Chapter 9
UNTIL YOU STOP FLINCHING
Look What You Made Me Do - Taylor Swift
Kookaburra
The room breathes with me. Dark walls, single light, concrete sweating in slow drops. It smells of rust and old rain.
He’s here again – the whisper that always comes when I start to remember.
“Show me,” he says. “Show me what you’ve learned.”
There’s a man strapped to a table.
Different man, same pleading eyes.
I don’t know his name. It doesn’t matter. Names are promises and I’ve stopped making those.
I pick up the blade. It’s small, thin, a surgeon’s toy. My reflection wavers along its edge. For a second I think I see him in it – the one who taught me – but it’s only my own mouth, smiling back.
“Pain’s a mirror,” the whisper reminds me.
So I make the first cut.
Not deep. Just enough. The skin opens like a confession.
He jerks, breath hitching, and I follow the rhythm of it – cut, gasp, cut, gasp – until it’s music.
My music.
I lean close, listening to the way sound changes when someone starts to break.
It’s almost beautiful, the shift from defiance to prayer.
“Good,” the whisper breathes. “Now listen.”
And I do. I listen to the wet slide of blood along tile. The tick of his teeth as they chatter against each other. The hush that follows when the world finally goes still.
Silence is a reward. Silence means I’ve done it right.
I tilt my head, watching the way light pools in the red.
For a moment, I imagine the whisper standing behind me, one hand on my shoulder, proud. “You see now? It’s not cruelty. It’s clarity.”
Something in me believes him. Always has.
I wipe the blade, methodical, careful not to smear the pattern on the floor. Each drop lands exactly where it should.
“Again,” he says. “Until you stop flinching.”
But I don’t flinch anymore.
Not from the smell, not from the sound, not from the way my heartbeat settles into calm when theirs stops.
The whisper fades as the light fades, leaving only the echo of his approval inside my chest.
I close my eyes, and in the dark behind them I’m still standing there – steady, quiet, humming the same tune he once did.