The Tool

The shape at the edge of the light does not move. It set the room and it is waiting. The room is one thing: the bound one on the floor, the lamp low, the axe to his hand.

The bound one has gone quiet. It has used up the sound, and its breathing is small and quick now. Its eyes are on him. He keeps his eyes from the face and looks at the work. It is set the way the other one was. This one is still in it.

That is the whole room. He turns it. He could set the axe down and step back. He could go out the way he came and not come back. The shape has not killed him, but that is no guarantee. It kept him here with a lit door and a choice.

Then the arguing starts. His hand re-grips the axe. The cost. There has to be a cheaper way — a man in a room with a bound person and a blade does not have to use the blade. He sets the reasons out one by one, and they are good, and they are all true, and none of them is the point. Behind the reasons, quiet and private, is the other thing that has been climbing. He keeps his hand on the tape. That is the tell. He is not deciding not to. He knows what that is. It is being seen.

The bound one is working for air. Watching him. Hoping. He feels the shape at his back, the breath held.

He does the thing.

He steps in off the ball of his foot. He takes the shoulder with his left hand and turns it, and the arm comes up where he wants it, and he lays the flat of the blade against the sleeve to find the line. The arm is thin under the wool. The point is above the elbow, below the shoulder joint, where the muscle is long and the bone is out of the way. He sets the edge.

He stops. The blade is at the sleeve, and the room holds him one whole breath — the shape behind him, the bound one under him, the lamp not moving. Then he brings it down.

The swing is short and whole and exact, the cut of a man who knows where the edge goes, and it lands where he set it. The blade bites through the sleeve and the skin and the thin layer under the skin in one line and does not stop at bone. The blood comes up bright in the lamp.

The bound one drags a little against its own weight on the boards. Then the sound comes from the chest, low and torn, and the name reaches him — “Lu” — and nothing after.

He does not watch it. The face is a thing.

He steps back. The axe is in his hand, the blood a bright line down the worn edge. It is done. The man he was is a little less after this.

The fear does not go. It turns.

He can feel it turn — the shake that was in his fingertips, gone. The shallow breath he had been holding, level. The hand is steady. It is the thing done right, the line exact, the edge where he meant it to be, and the pleasure of it comes up in him hot and clean, and it is the first thing he has ever done that was fully his.

He looks at the axe, blooded. The worn tape under his palm, the head, the weight of it. It is his now. The shape has not moved once. It watches. He is already thinking about the next one. The first layer is off, and the ones under it are worse, and there will be a next one. What is left in him is the thrill, and he wants it again.