Broken and useless, with the ache for that August Fourth’s rush dulled to a faint, shameful ember, I have, ever since, been reduced to a thing kept out of sight. I exist now folded into the dark belly of a cabinet in a locked room on the sixteenth floor of Robinson, Donovan, Madden & Barry—a nameplated world away from coal smoke and pigeon coops. The city hums far below: a lattice of carriage wheels and distant footsteps that no longer shake my frame. Up here, the air tastes of polished wood and old paper; it smells faintly of coffee and ironed collars instead of sawdust and blood.
The cabinet is narrow and obedient. Its door is heavy, its lock precise; the law firm’s orderly hands have put me where neither wind nor impulse can reach. By daylight, a sliver of light occasionally finds the seam where the door does not quite meet the frame, painting a thin golden line down my splinters. At night, the corridor beyond my prison thins to a hush broken by the soft click of heels and the low murmur of arguments about statutes and settlements—words that mean nothing to a thing once meant only to do. Once I lay in the ash and the dirt, exposed to all the small cruelties and wonders of a working house; now I am embalmed in bureaucracy and habit.
Memory keeps me awake more than any draft. I revisit the thunder of hand and the thrill of motion in little shocks that ripple through my cracked grain. Sometimes—I must admit—there is a brief, traitorous whisper that longs for the taste of exertion that day gave me: the dizzying surge, the terrible clarity. But the want is softer now, thinned by pain and by the endless sameness of paperwork and placard. I no longer ache with the same blind hunger. The scarred halves of me, pressed together in the cabinet, remember one another; one half dreams in splinters, the other dreams in shadows.
There is irony in my exile. I, who was bent, beaten, and taught to be heinous, have been tucked into a room that trades in reason and order. Lawyers pace past my door debating justice, and the name on the building’s brass—Robinson, Donovan, Madden & Barry—shines with a calm I cannot touch. I was made evil. I am the purveyor of death. I am the ax. And yet here, under lock and law, I wait—silent, splintered, and strangely diminished—while the world below continues to mistake civility for safety.