Blood Ties

Sera I don't feel the knife at first. I'm sitting against a rock the size of a small car, the kind that's been smoothed by decades of tide and weather, and I'm trying to catch my breath like I've just run too far. The beach is empty in the way beaches only are when something has gone wrong — no towels, no footsteps, no voices carried on the wind. Just the water pulling itself back and forth like it can't decide whether to stay. Then I notice the weight. There's pressure between my shoulder blades, deep and wrong, as if someone has leaned into me without permission. When I try to shift, my body refuses. Pain blooms late, hot and spreading, and I understand what's happened before I understand why. I've been stabbed. The knife is still there. I can feel it when I breathe — a dull scrape inside me, metal disagreeing with bone and muscle. I don't dare reach back. I don't need to. My body knows enough to stay very still. Blood runs faster than I expect. It seeps through my shirt, warm and slick, and drips down onto the sand between my legs. The pale grains darken instantly, turning rust-coloured, then almost black as the water creeps closer and pulls some of it away. The tide doesn't care. It never does. I try to stand. That's my first mistake. The world tilts sharply to the left, and I slide back down the rock, skin scraping, breath tearing out of me in a sound I don't recognise as my own. Stars burst behind my eyes. I bite down hard enough that my jaw aches, because screaming feels like it would waste something important. I press my forehead to my knees and count my breaths like I've been taught. In for four. Out for six. Again. My hands are shaking so badly I have to pin them against my thighs. This is how it ends, I think, distantly. On a beach I didn't plan to be on, bleeding into sand that will look untouched again by morning. It should feel dramatic. It doesn't. It feels stupid. Messy. Inconvenient. My phone is somewhere nearby — I remember dropping it when I fell — but turning my head makes the knife shift, and the pain spikes hard enough that my vision whites out. I swallow bile and force myself to stay still again. Don't move. Don't pull it out. Don't panic. My mum taught me that, once. The thought arrives uninvited, sharp as the blade in my back, and I almost laugh. Of all the things to surface now. I haven't thought of her in years — not properly — not without immediately pushing the memory away like a tongue probing a broken tooth. I used to tell people she was dead. The lie had been easy. Clean. People lowered their voices, touched my arm, moved on. No one asked what kind of mother she'd been, or what she'd taken with her when she left. Death made everything simple. It made me palatable. The truth is harder to explain, especially while bleeding out on a beach. She's alive. She always has been. Living somewhere else, wearing another version of herself, leaving damage behind her like fingerprints no one ever dusted for. I hated her enough to erase her. I hated her enough to practice saying it until it sounded natural. Another wave reaches me, cold water licking at my shoes, and the shock drags me back into my body. I hiss through my teeth and lift my feet, clumsy and slow. The blood is spreading now, a wide stain I can't ignore. Someone did this to me. That thought lands heavier than the pain. Not an accident. Not bad luck. A choice. I try to replay the last hour — the argument, the footsteps behind me, the moment the air changed — but everything blurs at the edges, as if my mind is protecting itself by withholding details. Or punishing me. My vision keeps drifting to the horizon, to where the sky meets the water in a thin, unbroken line. It looks peaceful. Unfairly so. If I survive this, I think, hazily, there are things I won't be able to keep buried anymore. The knife in my back is proof of that.