Holly Season for the Unborn Son

Madness does not come to beings like me; it arranges itself patiently, selecting which shards of borrowed memories and mismatched flesh will rise into thought. It gathers its senseless fragments into quiet configurations, deciding what my stitched mind will be able to bear. In that thin instant before the world fractured, I felt myself—an assembled filament of tremor and hunger—aware just long enough to recognise the blasphemous miracle of my existence. Then came the rupture: light devouring its own creation, silence collapsing upon its echo, until only one question clung to me like a final thread—Where am I, and to whom do I still belong?

I clawed my way through the drenched nightmare of this body he fashioned for me, my fingers grazing the bullet lodged deep within the patchwork he once called “life.” That small metal truth fastened me to the earth more honestly than he ever had. It was not death, nor duty, that held me—no, it was the ache of unfinished tenderness, the yearning for a father who refused even to name me. And still, the season of holly returns, as if the world believes garlands can absolve its cruelties. He moves among the living untouched by the horror of what he shaped, a solitary figure walking free while I remain the memory he pretends never existed.

With the strength that flickered through sinew not entirely my own, I pressed against the frozen ground, longing for a sliver of the world to reveal how much of it I still haunted. Music drifted in—light, impossible—like joy leaking from a wound the universe never intended to heal. A funfair. Had he left my body where laughter is manufactured, beside the restless machinery of wonder I was never allowed to know? He walked away believing himself redeemed, while the calliope’s bright, merciless tune curled through the air—the last sound to touch the monstrous shape he had made of me

—and the monstrous truth he could not bear to face in himself.