The Craft

He binds what he cut.

The cloth is in the room, clean and rolled, kept for this. Lu Di tears it with the blade and works it around the arm above the elbow, over the line he made. The blood comes slow through the cloth, a dark bead, then stops. He ties it off, a knot, and pulls it firm. The man on the board lies still, breathing low. His eyes are open and fixed on the wall. The blood is Lu Di’s now. It is on the blade and on his hands and under the edge of his nail, and the room is too quiet for the blood.

The shape stands back at the edge of the lower light, unmoved. It is a weight in the corner of the room, a breath that is not his. Lu Di does not look at it. He looks at his hands. The blood is a red seam in the lines of his palm.

He brought the director’s papers from the quarters. They are spread on the table. Lu Di reads them because there is nothing else to do. The schedule is columns and times, the days before the opening, who was to come in and who was to go out, what each of them was there for. The liability forms are a page of small print with a line for a signature at the bottom. On the line, the adult in charge had drawn a pencil mark and stopped. He never signed. He had written a name above the line and then was gone. The head-count form is clipped to a board. A dead man’s small records. They mean nothing now. The director was only the man who kept the axe in a drawer, and the drawer is empty, and the axe is in Lu Di’s hand.

The bound one stirs. The eyes open and find Lu Di. The body is hurt and waiting, the fear plain in the face. There is nothing in Lu Di that is sorry. What he feels is the need to be the one who did it.

He wants what comes next. It frightens him that he wants it.

He takes up the axe. The handle is worn where the hand sits, a dark glaze from a long hold. The edge carries a bright line from the bound man’s arm. The weight is a known weight now, and the axe is his: what a man has blooded, he keeps. He remembers the man who taught the exactness — the archer, who could put an arrow where he wanted it and never raised his voice. Caleb. On the range, a long time before, the man said, “Loose the breath first.” Lu Di learned to let the breath go and then to let the thing go, and the letting was the same, and the arrow went where he aimed it. The shot he learned from a dead man. Now it is a craft emptied of feeling. He can do it right, and it is not a comfort.

The shape moves. Not toward him. It goes to the side, into the lower lamp’s light, and looks at the bound man’s arm, where the cut is, then back at Lu Di. A checked turn toward the room behind them.

The next act is a deliberate injury, worse than the hurt. A maiming. He will have to do it. The counselor he was is not coming back to stop him.

He wants to see if he can do it right. He wants it worse than he is afraid of it.