The Wound

You climb stairs you've climbed a thousand times, mind already at the top. Your foot lands differently. The step dips – a hollow worn smooth in the stone. You stop. A hush falls over you – holiness carved by hands that never knew they were carving. You look down and see the stone polished by the slow erosion of people who walked these stairs exactly as you just were: hurried, elsewhere, already at the top.

The Path

The hollow asks nothing of you. You could walk on. Your foot could lift and fall and carry you past this ordinary holiness. Your instinct is to see these stairs as yours – stone that exists to hold your singular ascent. Your knees find the stone. You press your palm into the hollow. The stone answers. Blood-warm from use. The stone holds the shape of hands that stopped touching it centuries ago – the pilgrim who climbed before the wars, the old woman who stopped on this step to catch her breath and never rose. Your hand rests where theirs rested, deepening the hollow for hands you will never hold. You stand in the only place a human can stand: between the dead and the unborn, adding your own thin pressure to the stone.

The Shadow

The hollow can be loved wrongly – preserved into relic, or erased into blank. He was there when the step gave way – watched his father's foot go through the stone that had been worn too thin by too many pilgrims. The Relic-Maker remembers the sound: a crack, then a cry, then the long silence of a man learning his ankle would never walk the same. The stair had been holy. The stair had been loved. The love had worn it to nothing. He ropes off the hollow. He polishes the stone until it gleams – cold and untouched. He protects the holiness so well that he ensures no one can ever experience it again. He dies guarding a shrine that has forgotten the warmth of a human foot. The hollow stops deepening. The stone forgets the shape of feet. He dies guarding a relic that is pristine and dead. The steps his father broke himself on, now preserved beyond the reach of feet. ⧫ Another pressed her hand into the hollow once and recoiled as if burnt. She felt it: the shape of hands that were not hers. Hundreds of them. Thousands. All pressing the same stone, all leaving the same mark, all, in the end, indistinguishable from one another. She saw her grandmother's hand in the hollow. Her mother's. Her own, already beginning to match the shape. Every touch of hers was already a repetition. Every step, an echo. The hollow did not remember any single hand – only the accumulated pressure. She returns at night with pumice and patience. Liberation, she tells herself. A fresh start. She grinds the hollow flat – erasing the groove grain by grain, restoring the stone to its original plane. Her arms ache with devotion. The dust of a thousand pilgrimages coats her hands. By dawn, the step is flat. Pristine. A surface no foot has ever marked. She dies on featureless stone, having erased the only proof that anyone had ever climbed.

The Cut