THE UN-HARMONIOUS MAN
One
Sora wakes with a gasp and starts gulping for air.
“Everything’s going to be okay.” A familiar hand squeezes her shoulder, the shoulder that is nailed to the trunk of an enormous persimmon tree.
Sora can’t move her head either. It’s secured to the wood, but she doesn’t yet know how. Probably tied. She only learned about the foot-long nail angled sideways under her clavicle last week. She was trying to focus through the pus-film that pooled in her eyes, when she noticed the knobby end of a spike, the long shaft bent. Her only thought at the time and since was had it been an old spike going in, or had it been hammered and re-hammered so often and so hard that the metal had aged and weakened. She couldn’t remember how long she’d been like this.
“I’m here to help
