Death Bliss
It is the quiet of a man who has finally stopped holding himself together.
Serafina crosses the room. She does not rush. She walks the way she walked through the archive wing on her first day here, each step deliberate, each movement carrying the weight of someone who has learned that hurry is a luxury she cannot afford. She stops in front of me and she reaches down and takes my left hand, the hand that broke the chair, and she turns it over and looks at the palm.
There is a splinter in the meat of my thumb. I did not feel it go in. She pulls it out with her fingernails, small and precise, and she drops it on the floor beside the broken chair leg, and then she lifts my hand and presses it ag