I lower the veil like a penance. Thin gauze, soaked in sweat and smoke and something older than both, obedience. To live is to bleed for others. My body doesn’t move; it’s already behind me, slumped and gray and rotting, bones gnawed clean by expectation. I drag it anyway.
The thread cinched around my pinky is baby pink, deceptive in its softness. It cuts deep. Double-knotted, like a pact I never signed, a debt I inherited. I pull. It resists.
My spine folds. A knot blooms in my back, vertebrae twisted, swelling like a beast’s hump, monstrous and obscene. Then, rupture. Skin tears. A cactus erupts, wet and thorned and trembling. The monsoon follows. I’m drenched. It hurts. It hurts in the open air.
No one sees it. They only see the veil, and thank me for being polite.