You wake in silence that has been punctuated.
Not silence at all—ellipsis stretched into infinity.
A scalpel glints in the dark.
The room is an operating theater carved from vellum and bone. Its walls are lined with drafts nailed like saints to cathedral doors—bloated, yellowing, annotated with malice. The air reeks of printer ink and embalming fluid.
You lie on a table fashioned from rejection slips.
Your wrists are bound with frayed binding threads.
Your chest is already open.
Someone is reading you.
Not your story.
You.
---
A figure steps forward from the halo of archival light. Their coat is stitched from remainders; their gloves are dog-eared. Their face is a blur of editorial comments—"CUT THIS," "REPHRASE," "TOO SELF-INDULGENT"—scrawled over skin that refuses permanence.
They hold your heart between forceps.
It beats in iambic pentameter.
> "Do you see now?" the Surgeon whispers.
"The narrative was never yours.
It was ours."
They pull out your lungs.
