The Injury

The shape has set the room. It stands at the edge of the light, past the lamp, and it does not make a sound. It looks at the bound one on the boards, and then it looks lower, at the elbow, and it makes the checked turn toward that point and back to Lu Di. That is the message. The joint. The thing to be done to it.

The quiet that waits has a shape now. Here it is a lamp, a man on a floor, a blade in his hand, and the shape watching, and none of it moves, and the quiet is the loudest thing in the room.

The bound one breathes high and fast. It is laid on its side, the shoulders up off the wood, the head turned toward the door, the arms bound behind it. The cloth Lu Di tied over the first cut is dark and has stopped. It is not looking at him. Its eyes are fixed on the boards in front of its face.

Lu Di argues. He says the reasons to the shape, to the room, to himself. The man is already hurt. The man will be a long time healing, if anyone ever comes back for him. A second wound gains nothing. Get up. Walk out. Leave the rest of it to the night. The reasons are good and true, and he has used them before and meant them.

This time he does not mean them.

He knows why, and it is worse than the first time. He is checking that he can do it right, feeling the edge, testing the weight, running the stroke through his head to see how it lands. The wanting to do it right is what frightens him. It frightens him more than the act ever did, because the part of him that would have put the axe down has no answer to it. There is only the want.

He goes down beside the man. He takes the shoulder and turns it the way he turned it before, and the arm lifts off the boards and across the body, the sleeve open where the first cut is. The joint is below it, small under the skin. He finds the line with his thumb.

He sets the edge of the axe against the joint. He holds a breath. He brings the head down, flat, in the exact stroke he learned on the range, from a dead man.

It bites clean. It goes in through the sleeve and into the hinge, and the hinge is cut, and the lower arm goes dead, hanging. The blood comes up in a bright run.

The bound one screams. The sound goes off the walls and the lamp and does not stop being one sound, and there is no word in it and nothing to hold. The body works against the boards. It gets the head up, and the eyes find Lu Di, and they do not leave him.

Lu Di watches his own hand do it. He is beside the man, the axe still in his hand, the blood up the edge and across his knuckles, and he looks at the arm where the arm used to hinge, and the fear is not there. It did not come. What is in him now is the thrill, clean and full, the hand sure, the line exact, nothing wasted. It is stronger than the first time, and the shape stands where it was, and it does not look away.

Then he catches himself.

He is crouched over a man he has crippled, and the blood is coming out of it, and the joy is running through him, and the smallest part of him that is still the counselor is there, and it looks away. It turns its eyes from the arm, from the face, to the wall, and it does not come back.

He does not stop.

He does it right. He does not flinch. The counselor he was is gone. It has stopped being about living. It is about the thrill of the thing, and the next act is a blade and a finished man, and he is already good at it.