The Weight of Nothing - Chapter Three
Chapter Three: The Wall
Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter One
Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter Two
The woman with the scar arrives at the wall and sees what everyone’s seeing: words scratched into stone. Fresh ones. Old ones underneath. Layers of them.
WHO DID THIS TO US
THEY TOOK YESTERDAY BUT THEY CANT TAKE THE BODY
MY HANDS REMEMBER
THERE WAS A BEFORE
A crowd has formed. Maybe twenty people. Some touching the wall. Others standing back like it might bite. A few are crying. Not sure why, but their faces wet anyway.
The knitting woman is there, cord around her shoulders now, hands still working. The boy stands near the front. Others the scar woman doesn’t recognize. Or maybe she does. Maybe everyone is both stranger and familiar now.
She pushes forward. Her hand reaching for the wall before she decides to. Fingers tracing the letters. Each groove holding something her mind can’t access but her body recognizes. Evidence.
Someone has left broken stones at the base. Pieces of concrete from the crater, maybe. Sharp edges. Perfect for carving.
She picks one up. Presses it to blank stone. Her hand moves automatically, forming letters:
A. N. T. O. N. I. O.
She stares at what she’s written. The name means nothing. Everything. Her hand cramping around the stone. Five letters she shouldn’t know how to spell but does. Perfectly. Her wrist curves to add the accent mark her mind doesn’t remember: ANTONIO.
“You’re remembering.”
She turns. The boy. He’s breathless. Excited. Scared.
“My body remembers,” she says. “It’s not the same.”
“It’s how it starts.” He gestures at the wall. “More people every day. Their hands doing things. Going places. Making things. The erasure, maybe it’s not permanent.”
“Everything is permanent.”
“Then why are you here? Why did you write that name?”
She looks back at the letters. Antonio. The taste of the word in her mouth. Shapes her tongue wants to form. She tries: “An…”
The sound cuts off. Like hitting a wall inside her throat. But her body knows. Knows.
Behind her, someone else is carving. A man. His hand shaking but steady enough. He writes: ANA.
The man from the corner. The one who’s always crying. He’s not crying now. Just carving. Over and over. ANA. ANA. ANA.
“Ana,” he says aloud. “I had a daughter. She fit in my hands. Right here.” He cups air. “Small. She smelled like…” His face crumples. “I can’t remember what but my nose knows it. Clean. Powdered. New.”
“Stop,” someone says. A woman, older. Gray in her hair. “Don’t do this. The erasure was mercy.”
“Was it?” The fountain man, that’s what the scar woman thinks of him now, turns. “Mercy for who?”
“For all of us.” The gray-haired woman’s voice cracks. “Whatever we did. Whatever happened. We don’t have to carry it anymore.”
“My body is carrying it anyway,” the fountain man says. “Every morning I wake up and my arms ache. They want to hold her. Where is she? What happened to her?”
Silence. The question hanging like the mantra. Heavier.
A woman near the back speaks. “My breasts hurt. Like they’re full. Like someone needs…” She stops. “But there’s no one. There’s nothing.”
The knitting woman holds up her chain. Fifteen feet now. “I’m making a blanket. For someone who needed blankets. Someone small. Someone mine.”
More people approach. Drawn by the gathering. Or by their bodies’ insistence. A man with hands that won’t stop tying knots. A woman who keeps humming the same melody, off-key, no words, but committed. An older man whose fingers drum constantly, practicing scales on invisible keys.
“I am from the place where your eyes meet with a void,” someone intones. The mantra. The liturgy.
But it sounds different here. Less automatic. More desperate.
The boy speaks up. “There are more of us. People whose hands remember. We should meet. Share what we’re learning. Decide what to do.”
“Do about what?” the gray-haired woman demands.
“About this.” The boy gestures at the wall. At all of them. “About whether we want to remember or whether we want the void back.”
The scar woman touches Antonio’s name. Then adds below it, her hand moving without permission: DEAD?
She doesn’t know why she adds the question mark. But her hand insists. Because maybe, maybe he’s not dead. Maybe he’s somewhere else, with his own wall, carving her name. Or maybe not her name. Maybe someone else’s. Maybe that’s what her body knows. That he moved on before. That he always moved on.
“Meet when the sky darkens,” the fountain man says. “I know a place. Or my feet know a place.”
“How will we find it?” someone asks.
“Your body will bring you,” the knitting woman says. Still knitting. Always knitting. “If it wants you there.”
They agree. Disperse slowly. But the scar woman stays. Staring at Antonio’s name. At the word DEAD. At the question mark that changes everything.
Her body brought her here. Made her carve his name. But it also added the question. The doubt. The possibility that what she’s remembering isn’t the whole truth.
She picks up her stone again. Below DEAD?, she writes: BURNT OIL.
The smell. That’s what her body remembers most. That’s what makes her shoulders tighten and her hands form fists.
She steps back. Studies her section. Antonio. Dead? Burnt oil.
It’s not much. But it’s hers. Her testimony. Her evidence against the void.
Around her, the wall fills. More names. More words. More fragments. The city’s somatic memory made visible. Made permanent. Made dangerous.