Still Here

The hole is fifteen millimetres and took, at most, a second. They can read the angle: from the front, from above, through the lung and out the thin blade that lets light through when you hold it up. They can't read the hand. A hunt goes wrong at that distance too. The authors say so, and the headlines skip that sentence.

The tooth is slower. Split down its length years before, and the body kept chewing round it, and the mouth kept laying down tartar, a thin layer each day it was still alive, over the open canal.

Nobody survives a face like that on their own for very long, so somebody did something with soft food and patience, or else the mouth was luckier than I can explain. I'll take the first.

That's the trouble with calling bone a verdict. A verdict is one moment, and a wound is one moment, so they look like they fit. But the other thing in the bone took a year, and it wrote down every day of it, in the only grammar a mouth has: still here, still here, still here.

The spear has an angle. The care has a count. If I had to pick which one speaks, it's the one that kept speaking.