Perspective: The Fragment
I remember laughing.
It slipped out of me thin and cracked, a sound that startled even my own ears. For the space of a breath, I felt something like arrival. Then weight found me—quiet, implacable—and pressed until the world tipped. A rush of dark. A scrape, a split across my palm, a flare like iron dragged through flesh. Thought shattered. I dropped into nothing.
When I stirred again, cold rubbed its grain along my cheek. Rough. Damp. The name for it slipped back into reach—stone—though I had never felt it shove so hard against a face that was mine. Water collected somewhere above and tapped down the wall, counting a time I didn't remember agreeing to. The air smelled of sour rot and wet wood. My awareness clung to small things because larger things scattered when I touched them.
Something wet slicked beneath my fingers. I lifted my hand into the slant of light that bled in from the alley's mouth. Red traced my skin in uneven strokes. Blood. I had known the sight of it—on fields, across blades, running away from a body that could not hold it—but this was nearer. It sat on my palm like a confession and made my chest tighten in a way I did not understand.
A throb moved through the cut—sharp, bright, then duller, then bright again. Pain. The idea found me and did not leave. It sounded simple from far away; here, inside the hand, it was busy and personal. Each beat of it felt like a small hammer refusing to be reasoned with.
My breath came ragged, loud to my own ears. Breath had once been a rhythm I watched from outside. Now each draw scraped a little, as if the air itself were thick and I was not skilled at taking it. Another pull. Another. The work of staying somehow now demanded actual effort.
I tried to push up from the ground. My arms shook and gave me only a little height. Something unseen pressed me back toward the earth—steady, certain, uninterested in my wishes. Gravity. The name sat there, plain as a stone, and yet knowing it did nothing to steady my elbows. My knees tried to help and failed; a tremor ran down them like rain slipping off eaves. I paused and closed my eyes, as if darkness would make standing simpler. It didn't.
Hunger woke as I moved. A hollow twisting, low and mean. The concept had been tidy before this—calories and fire, numbers that turned into will. In this body, it was a small animal gnawing, patient and certain. I pressed a palm to my stomach and felt it complain beneath the touch. Naming it helped nothing.
I tried again for height and earned it by inches. The world leaned left, and I followed it, my shoulder bumping the wall. Balance slid away as if it had greased its own path. I waited for the lean to stop. It did, a little. My ribs ached where the stone had first introduced itself to me. The ache was quieter than the hand but more everywhere. I listened to it the way one listens to a storm beyond a hill.
Voices drifted from the street beyond the alley. My mind gathered their sounds and laid meaning under them, though I could not say where the meanings had been taught. A man laughed too loudly to impress someone who would not be impressed. Someone argued about a price, or a favor, or a promise—it was hard to tell, the edges of their words softened by distance and night. Language lived in me like a house I had not walked through in years: I knew the rooms, but every doorway surprised me.
A cart creaked past. The wheel hit a rut and clattered. The sound bumped against my skull and scattered there. I flinched and then stood still, as if my own stillness could steady anything else.
A drop of water finally left its place above me and landed on my collarbone. Cold threaded itself under the fabric and searched for skin. I became aware of the rest of me—the grit on my forearms, the bruise blooming along a hip, the sore in the wrist I had used to catch myself. Small messages came in from everywhere, and none of them asked permission to arrive.
I examined my hand again. The cut was a thin, uneven mouth, already gathering dirt at the edges. It did not look like it belonged on me, but I could not make it belong anywhere else. I pressed my thumb against the wound to see if pressure would quiet it. It protested. I let go.
Something inside my chest quivered when I imagined stepping out of the alley. Not a thought so much as a tightening. Unease settled there—an animal different from hunger, smaller but with sharper teeth. Fear might be the right name. The shape of the idea fit, though I had never worn it. I stood and let the feeling pass through me so I could count it, the way I had counted the water's tapping. It stayed a while and then changed color into simple caution.
Light from the street tried its best to reach me. It failed halfway and fell across a broken crate, which had likely been the thing that cut me. Splinters stood up along one edge like a line of teeth. I pictured the moment of falling—not all of it, only a smear: a tilt, a rush, a sudden introduction to hardness. A laugh breaking off. That much I remembered. The rest refused me.
I slid my back along the wall and edged toward the brighter portion of the dark. The alley narrowed near the mouth, the ground there more a suggestion than a surface. My feet found glass once and learned not to find it again. When I reached the place where the alley ended and the street began, I stopped. Not from the decision itself. But from the uncertainty about what came next.
People passed. Their steps threw small shadows across me and then took them away again. A woman carried a basket, cloth pulled up over it to keep the night from stealing heat. A boy ran, then remembered he was hiding and slowed, but his joy leaked through anyway. Two men talked close, their heads almost touching, the word debt tucked under every syllable. None of them looked at me long. I watched them and wished I understood the rules of being among them.
The cut in my hand had settled into a steady ache. I turned the palm down and let my fingers hang toward the ground. The blood darkened as it dried, turning from bright to stubborn. I rubbed it off on my shirt. It left a mark there like a crude signature, and the idea that it was mine startled me.
A breeze reached into the alley and moved the smells around. Somewhere, meat is cooked over an open fire. Somewhere else, refuse rotted in a way that meant someone had not come for it when they should have. The world carried on loudly. I felt very quiet inside it.
I put a hand to the wall again and stood straighter. The dizziness did not like that and tried to climb back up through me. I waited until it lost interest. A sound burst from the street—laughter—full and careless. I recognized the shape of it and could not remember being inside it. Its warmth slid past me like light skipping off water.
Time did a strange thing: it stretched thin and then snapped back. A minute might have gone by. Or many. I found that the counting didn't matter as much as staying upright. Upright felt like an oath no one had asked me to swear, but which I was swearing anyway.
A man glanced in, the kind who pretends a whistle is bravery. His eyes snagged on me and then moved away too quickly. For a heartbeat, I saw a softer look settle there—something that weighed more than fear, though afraid was part of it. Pity. It touched me and left as if ashamed of itself. I did not like the taste it put in my mouth.
My breath had evened without asking. The scrape in it remained, but it no longer sounded like a storm. The ache in my stomach showed me its teeth again. I considered the street, the food on it, the faces that would own it, the hands that would push mine away. The imagining built a picture made mostly of doors.
I flexed my injured hand once and watched the skin pull against itself. It would not close tonight. That knowledge did not bother me, which thus bothered me.
"Walk," I told myself, to see if the sound of my own voice would obey me. The name came out low and hoarse, as if it had needed dust cleared from it. I took a step. My body agreed, though with conditions. Another step. The alley did not trust me to leave and pulled at my ankles with its old, damp cold. I left anyway.
The street met me like a crowd that hadn't decided if I was welcome. I kept close to the wall where the shadows made a path. People flowed by, carrying their small wars and small mercies in their hands. I moved among them the way a stone might move among fish—too slow, an object to be avoided, something that didn't belong to the current but still changed it a little.
Hunger prodded me toward the smell of cooking and then warned me away from the men standing near it. Caution had learned to speak faster than desire. My cut beat its small drum. The bruise along my side ripened. Breath kept its contract. I named none of these things aloud because naming had not once convinced any of them to behave.
At the end of the street, a lantern swung from a hook and wrote a circle of gold on the ground. I stopped just outside it. The circle looked like a place where a person might stand if they wished to be seen. I did not wish that. Not yet. I watched it and listened to it hiss.
I did not know where to go. That sentence, quiet and clean, arranged itself in me without asking permission. I let it sit there. It did not accuse, it only described.
Somewhere above my head, hidden by rooflines and the poor geometry of this place, stars were doing their old patient work. I could not see them. The idea that they were present anyway comforted nothing and changed nothing, but it gave me a point on which to rest my eyes, even if it was only a thought.
I leaned my shoulder against the wall and decided to remain standing. It felt like the smallest victory I could claim without lying to myself. Hunger would keep speaking. Pain would keep its appointment. Breath would continue to count for me. If I did not know what to do after this, then after this would have to begin when it arrived.
For now, I stayed where the alley ended and the world began, and I did not fall.