The Sovereign Scar
The noises come to her all at once. Voices and whirls. The insistent beeping of an alarmed machine. She tests one eyelid, but the fluorescents choose violence. Rude, after a dream of bare feet on leaf litter, a forgotten library in a twilit glade. But there’s something else: a cold circle, too tight on her wrist. Dread stabs to the marrow, clean and clinical. They discovered it while she was under. If only she could go back down. To the glade, to the obsidian darkness. The safe place. If they know about the scar, which means she is not who she’s supposed to be, the icy drip of Propofol is the only haven she can hope for.
Eyes shut, face neutral. Don’t let them see you’ve come to. She forces the panic down her throat like cough syrup. Wills her pulse to slow. Her ruse has been convincing, but the taste of it has washed out of her mouth now. How could she have let herself be discovered? The accident assembles, fragmented in her mind. A crash destructive enough to shake loose her desperate grip on vigilance.
She traded it for power. Willingly, knowingly. The scar remains, proof. She should be a specter. Yet she lives.
But she didn’t need the delicate, feeble thing anymore. In the blistering dawn of her efficacy, she shed the superfluous, vestigial parts of herself no longer required. Once she was more, she needed less. And in the liminal dale her fullness manifested. If it’s true that her soul and wits are enough, might she merely go in, rather than up?
Her books beckon her. The velvet hush of leaves and pages, all there are to flutter with no pulse within her. If she can shed this last vestige of corporeal shackle, it will be her best escape act after countless leavings.
But she pauses, considers. If she abandons her body, will she merely haunt what she meant to inhabit? Will she be enough without the vessel which has held her? They will never set her free. They will study and prod. As ever, her only rescue is to leave something behind.
Without as much as a twitch, she says farewell to the lock of her hair by her right temple that defied gravity, to the knee that wobbled, unsure on icy pavement. No longer will she scratch at the dry patch on her upper arm or wince at the ache of her lower back. She will mourn the mossy hazel of her irises and the elegant taper of every finger.
But she conjures a tunnel in her consciousness. A rough-hewn portal from this sterile bed, leading to the wild, verdant tangle of her wood. And she takes a tentative, footless step forward. A gentle rip, the soft collapse of her embodiment. She is lighter than she thought possible.
Floating towards the moonlit clearing, a purposeful, weightless march. Solitude and sovereignty, complete. At last, at last. Exhilaration drives her forward with elation, not felt this keenly since she plucked out her heart and fed it to the forest.