I Am Unfinished
A dream of smoke like memory around the throat ( Ep. #12)
The smoke is rising. Not from the eyes exactly but from behind them, where the skull thins and something has found a seam. Threads first, then longer lengths, holding their edge as they lift past the rope. It has remembered a direction. The body recalls another.
I am unfinished.
A tree. Not this one. The other one, the earlier one, the one that is always a doorway. It leans. It straightens. The smell of sweetness and rot. It blooms without having budded, petals already caught in the bark, arrived too late to fall. He is under it. He has always been under it.
His mother’s hands, flour to the wrist.
I am unfinished.
Fruit in his mouth — bitten and unbitten at once, the pulp refusing to dissolve, opening instead, a stem forming where there was none. Branches along the airway. Leaves flat against the tongue. The throat becomes something that grows. What tightens around it takes the shape of what grows. What grows takes the shape of what tightens.
A door that never latched right. The sound it made in wind.
Stone closing. Walls folding inward, tightening like fiber, like the twist of something that has always known this shape, each turn pulling another into place. At the center — a box. It does not open because everything around it has agreed not to let it. The stone closes like a mouth that will not say the word.
Something inside.
Not sleeping.
Held.
I am unfinished.
Her face. Not beautiful, not plain. Specific. The only face that knew him before he knew himself. She is saying something he already knows and is hearing for the first time. She is at the door. She is flour to the wrist. She is already gone and still here, which is the same thing, which has always been the same thing.
A word she said once. Not tender, not cruel. Accurate. He didn’t understand it then.
I am unfinished.
The coins are falling through all of this. They have always been falling. They pass him and do not touch him. They strike nothing and the sound arrives anyway — one clean note, then another, then another. A decision already made. Three times.
A dog that died. Its name arriving now with the weight of a verdict.
The smoke moves between all of it. Through coin, through air, through the narrow space where something almost opens. Rising past the tree that is also a doorway. Past what tightens that is also a line being drawn. Past the throat that has become a branching thing.
The presence inside the box presses against its interior. Not burning. Not dimming. The pressure returning the shape that contains it, learning it.
Water cupped from a stream. Cold enough to hurt.
The cricket, still. Already beginning to be found by something.
A window. Below it a street that continued without him. He watches it for one whole afternoon. He cannot remember why. He is watching it now.
I am unfinished.
The box remains sealed.
Her face.
The coins landing — each one a different note, each note the same note, the same afternoon, the same door, the same flour, the same specific yellow of light through a curtain that was once something else, that is something else now, that has always been both things at once —
A body inside all of it. Aligned with the tree, with what tightens, with the lock. Hair lifting though there is no wind. The face already turned and always turning.
And somewhere — no place, not exactly — a listening shifts.
Not an arrival.
A change in attention.
Slight as a thread being taken up.
The smoke continues.
I am unfinished.
At the furthest edge — a quality of blue. Not cold. Older than cold.
And in the space that remains — not spoken, not formed, but held the way breath is held before it becomes a word:
Please.
I am unfinished.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Fun fact: in 1883, Carlo Collodi originally ended The Adventures of Pinocchio with the boy hanging dead from a tree—a punishment for disobedience before readers demanded his resurrection.