The Threshold

You wake clutching the wound. The blade is gone, but the flesh remembers its shape. Inside it, a pulse beats slower than yours. Between the beats, it asks: What will you make of me?

The Way

The body screams: numb the nerve, stitch it shut before it speaks. You refuse. You sit in the breach and let the nerves burn. How did you slip past my guard? The blade did not open the gap. It found one. You find the place you never looked. The guard was everywhere but there. The skin draws tight. Where it heals, it sets to stone. The sword asked: Are you weak? The scar answers: I was.

The Shadow

The Unshaken watched his mother go hollow while she was still breathing. Her silence ate the house room by room until she could fit inside the void her husband left. In that quiet, he swore: not me. Now he seals every wound before it can draw breath, the tissue closing before the blood can speak. But the body keeps admitting what he tries to lock away. At a certain name, his hand flies to his neck. When a crowded table falls quiet, his shoulders give. At the first catch in a voice, he excuses himself. Each seal holds. Each wound finds another mouth. ❖ The Candid learnt young that a room tilts towards the wound. A half-told story at dinner. A caught breath. The confessional pause that empties the air. An open wound, she found, commands a gravity no scar could ever match. Each morning her fingernails seek the seam, clawing out the night's mending before the flesh can knit. Don't close, she breathes. I'm not done with you. The years pass. At dinners she begins the story, the caught breath, the pause – and the table no longer leans in. The wound has been told too often to bleed. Still, she recites it, picking at a dry seam. The chairs are empty.

The Cut