You smashed the pen.
Shattered it against stone, set the shards in salt, whispered every counterspell you half-remembered from childhood.
But ink still seeps.
From your faucets.
From your walls.
From your skin.
You wake up soaked in it, your sheets a swamp of sentences you don't remember drafting. Your veins pulse in verse. Your heartbeat scrawls sonnets on the insides of your eyelids.
Your blood tests come back with an anomaly.
Too much iron, they say. Too much pigment.
You don't correct them. How could they understand that your hemoglobin now conjugates in past perfect?
Every time you speak, ink stains the corners of your mouth. The words smear on the air.
You cough.
Something solid lands in your palm.
A paragraph.
Still warm.
Still twitching.
---
APPENDIX CCC.X: THE CORRECTIONS THAT UNMADE YOU
At first, they were small.
Your birthdate changed on official records. Nothing major. A typo, maybe.
Then came the rest.
