Roses

Saboteur

Louie Boy

Now Showing: Pee-wee as Himself

The School Exam (1862)

There are places we walk into and immediately feel our pulse change. Not because of what’s happening in the moment—but because of what has already happened there. The walls remember. Or maybe it’s us. Maybe we remember too well.

Today was the first day of summer school. My regular classroom—my quiet space of control and comfort—is under HVAC construction. That means, for the next month, I’ll be teaching in the high school building. It’s a place I know well, though I wish I didn’t. My history with that building is long, and frankly, complicated. For years, as an off-site teacher working with at-risk students, my relationship to the high school has felt like that of a distant cousin: present, acknowledged, but peripheral. I’ve been overlooked, sometimes dismissed, sometimes outright disregarded. And like anyone who has been made to feel invisible, I built up armor to survive it.

I entered the day with that armor still strapped on—resentment in one pocket, skepticism in the other. But by the time I left, something had softened. Not entirely. Not in a way that resolves all things. But enough. Enough to notice that maybe what I’ve been holding onto all these years isn’t about the building itself. It’s about the people who once filled it. And they’re not there anymore.

We don’t talk enough about workplace hurt. About how real it is. About how it lingers. Especially in schools—where the culture of professionalism often means quietly absorbing every blow. A snide comment. A meeting where your input is ignored. A student you fought for who slipped through the cracks anyway. A colleague who undercuts you. An administrator who sees numbers, not names.

It accumulates.

The psychologist Gabor Maté writes that “trauma is not what happens to you, but what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.” In other words, trauma isn’t always the catastrophe—it’s the long echo of it. It’s how we internalize judgment, isolation, and disrespect. It’s how we build stories around our pain to protect ourselves from being hurt again.

For me, that story was this: the high school doesn’t see me. Doesn’t value what I do. Doesn’t understand the work of teaching students who live on the edge of the system.

Maybe that story was true once. Maybe it wasn’t. But what matters now is that I carried it into today—and the people around me didn’t deserve it. And more than that, I didn’t deserve to carry it anymore.

Albert Anker’s 1862 painting Das Schulexamen (The School Exam) lives in this tension between performance and judgment. In it, a barefoot child stands before a tribunal of seated adults, reciting from a sheet hung on a blackboard. The examiners lean forward or away, some bored, some attentive. The child’s teacher watches, rod behind his back, as rows of children look on. The mood is reverent, almost sacred. But beneath it all, there’s a quiet tension—a sense that something more than knowledge is being evaluated.

When I look at that painting, I don’t just see a school exam. I see the emotional experience of being watched. Of standing under the scrutiny of people who have power over you. I see not just the child, but the teacher too—back stiff, hands folded, preparing for judgment himself.

The classroom isn’t just a place of learning. It’s a site of visibility. And for many teachers—especially those outside the center of institutional power—it becomes a space of ongoing emotional negotiation. You learn to read the room. To sense when you're being dismissed. To measure every word in meetings. To anticipate where the next slight might come from. And over time, those things don’t just stay at work. They bleed.

We’re told to separate work life and home life. To draw a line between the professional and the personal. But anyone who’s worked in a school—or any emotionally demanding environment—knows how false that line is.

You carry your students home in your thoughts. You replay conversations in the shower. You feel a cold silence in a hallway and wonder if it was meant for you. You pour your whole self into work, and when that self is overlooked or belittled, the pain doesn't clock out at 3:30.

Professional relationships are relationships. They have the power to shape how we see ourselves. How we value our contributions. How we view our place in the world. And when those relationships are marked by disrespect or marginalization, it’s not petty to feel hurt. It’s human.

But time changes things. People leave. Systems shift. And sometimes, without realizing it, we change too.

Today, standing once again in those hallways, I expected to feel angry. Instead, I felt strangely fine. The ghosts weren’t gone—but they no longer had their grip on me. The people who once triggered that sense of erasure are no longer there. And maybe more importantly, I’m not the same person who once needed their validation.

The work I do still matters. The students I serve still deserve everything I have. But the story I tell myself about where I belong—that’s what changed today. I don’t need the high school to see me the way I once did. I see myself now. I know what I’m worth. And in that knowing, the old resentment begins to loosen.

Maybe this is what healing looks like—not erasure of memory, but its reframing. Maybe the rooms we fear walking into aren’t haunted by others, but by former versions of ourselves. Versions still waiting to be affirmed. Still hoping to be seen.

But now I can walk those halls with quiet dignity. Not because everything is fixed, but because I no longer need it to be.

And maybe that’s the lesson of Das Schulexamen too: that being watched doesn’t always mean being judged. Sometimes, it means being witnessed. And sometimes, it means learning to witness yourself.

Rose

Yard Work

Supine Woman (1963)

She lies there, dressed in white, arms at her sides, black heels still on her feet. The space around her is blank—no pillow, no chaise, no drapery. Just a woman, supine, reduced to form and posture. She does not meet our gaze. She does not offer us one. And in that refusal, she becomes perhaps the most unsettling figure in a tradition filled with pleasure, performance, and pretense.

Wayne Thiebaud’s Supine Woman (1963), painted at the height of Pop Art’s rise in America, looks deceptively simple. At first glance, it fits within Thiebaud’s celebrated aesthetic: clean lines, stylized outlines, a flattening of depth that borrows from commercial art and illustration. But this work offers no sweetness, no satire. Instead, it delivers a confrontation. Not only with the tradition of the reclining nude in Western art, but with the very act of looking—of men painting women, of viewers consuming their stillness, their exposure, their performance.

And this time, the woman on the canvas is Thiebaud’s daughter, Twinka. She is not nude. Yet she stands in for centuries of women who were. In that substitution, Supine Woman becomes something rare: a portrait that dismantles the very history it inherits.

To understand Supine Woman, one must first understand what it evokes and subsequently rejects. The reclining nude has long functioned as a central motif in Western art, a pose that signifies not rest but display. As art historian Kenneth Clark wrote in The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, the nude is not simply a naked body but "a form of art that idealizes and objectifies the human figure" (Clark, 1956). From the idealized sensuality of Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) to the calculated provocation of Manet’s Olympia (1863), the nude has been shaped primarily by male desire and male authorship.

Titian’s Venus reclines in a setting that suggests both intimacy and possession. Her gaze is demure, her nudity romanticized, her form soft and receptive. This is not merely a body; it is a body positioned for the male gaze. Her hand gestures modesty, but her presence confirms availability.

When Manet painted Olympia, he disrupted that tradition with a single, revolutionary gesture: eye contact. Olympia stares directly at the viewer, unashamed and unapologetic. She is not an allegory. She is a woman. The shock of the painting lies not in her nudity but in her self-possession. As T.J. Clark writes, Olympia "tells us that she is looking at us, that she is aware of being looked at, and that she controls what we see" (The Painting of Modern Life, 1985). It was a visual insurrection against centuries of aestheticized submission.

Thiebaud’s Supine Woman mirrors the structure of these works, but empties it of its erotic content. The figure lies in the classical pose—horizontal, symmetrical, serene. But the mood is clinical, not sensual. Her dress is plain, her heels intact. She is not lounging but staged. The canvas offers no setting, no narrative, no reason. The viewer is denied every conventional cue for pleasure or intimacy.

This is where the language of Pop Art is subverted. Thiebaud, often grouped with contemporaries like Warhol and Lichtenstein, was acutely aware of the formal tools of advertising and mass media. He once said, "I was interested in the object as an object of contemplation, but also how it was mediated through commercial imagery" (Thiebaud, quoted in Molesworth, Pop Art: A Critical History, 1997). In Supine Woman, the body becomes such an object. It is rendered with clarity and order, but not affection. The precision distances us.

Knowing that the subject is Twinka Thiebaud, the artist’s daughter, deepens this distancing. This is not an eroticized body. It is familial, familiar, and therefore rendered inaccessible to desire. Thiebaud is not sexualizing his daughter. He is placing her in a historically loaded pose to expose its constructed nature. Her stillness is not passive; it is diagnostic.

Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), articulates the mechanisms of the male gaze in film—mechanisms equally applicable to painting. She argues that women are "displayed as sexual object[s]" for the viewing pleasure of male spectators, and that this system "determines the viewer’s relation to the image." The reclining nude operates within precisely this dynamic.

John Berger, in Ways of Seeing (1972), further explains: "Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at." Thiebaud’s Supine Woman refuses this structure. The woman does not appear to be watching herself being looked at. Nor is she acting. She is simply there—unavailable to the mechanisms of projection.

This absence of response is what makes the painting radical. It does not invite the viewer into a fantasy. It leaves the viewer unacknowledged, almost unwelcome. And in doing so, it collapses the gaze. The viewer is left not with gratification, but with the realization that they have been denied it.

Twinka Thiebaud, the model, would later become a prominent figure in American photography—notably in Judy Dater’s Imogen and Twinka at Yosemite (1974), an image that plays consciously with female gaze, generational contrast, and the nude as subject rather than object. But in 1963, she is offered not as muse, nor as self-possessed figure, but as a kind of living citation.

By placing his daughter in the pose of a nude without stripping her of clothing, Thiebaud creates what might be called an "after-image" of the nude. This is not the nude undone, but the nude exhausted. It is an echo of centuries of performance, now drained of allure. The result is neither erotic nor sentimental. It is elegiac.

This decision also aligns with feminist critiques of representation in the 1960s and 70s. As art historian Griselda Pollock notes in Vision and Difference (1988), "Feminist interventions in art history require us not only to see what is absent but to analyze why it is absent." In Supine Woman, what is absent is precisely what had always been assumed: availability, vulnerability, permission.

Supine Woman is not a painting that offers pleasure. It is a painting that withholds. In this, it performs an act of quiet subversion. Thiebaud takes the most familiar pose in Western art and recasts it not as invitation but as indictment. The woman on the canvas does not seduce. She endures.

The gaze that has shaped the history of the nude finds no purchase here. What remains is a flattened icon, a body withdrawn from the aesthetic economy of submission. In her stillness, she does not beckon. She bears witness.

And we, the viewers, are left not to admire, but to reflect. On what we expect from the female form. On how we have been taught to look. On what remains after the gaze has been turned back on itself.

Now Showing: Oklahoma City Bombing: One Day in America

Jaws

I:IV:III: Blood for Blood

III: Blood for Blood

The frost had returned in the night, smoothing the yard with a crust of pale glass that gleamed faintly beneath the first touch of dawn. It cracked softly beneath the boots of the patrolmen as they moved among the stalls, saddling their mounts and muttering half-warmed curses into the cold. Their breath hung in the air like thin ghosts, vanishing before it reached the ground. Even the animals seemed subdued, their movements sluggish in the brittle morning light.

At first bell, it was Simon Braye who found it.

He’d gone to check the tether lines behind the paddock, moving with the bleary determination of a man trying to complete his chores before the chill fully bit through his cloak. He stopped at the edge of the fence, squinting at something hanging from the post near the water trough. At a distance, it looked like nothing more than a bundle of straw and bone, maybe something a crow had scavenged and dropped. But as he stepped closer, his stomach clenched.

It was deliberate.

Twisted stalks of winter reed, bound with braids of horsehair, the ends stained dark with ash. A small bead of pine, polished smooth and etched with a crude circle and cross, hung at the center like a staring eye. Beneath it, a single chicken’s foot dangled from a length of red thread, its claws shriveled and sharp against the pale sky.

Simon stopped short, his hand drifting instinctively to the hilt of his belt knife. His breath caught in his throat.

"Oswin!" he called, voice louder than he intended. It rang out across the yard, sharp and uneasy.

The gatehouse stirred. Oswin emerged moments later, his cloak still draped around his shoulders and a steaming cup of water in his hand. His eyes followed Simon’s gesture, and he frowned before he’d even reached the fence.

Wilmot appeared next, trailing behind with a bucket of grain in both hands. He stopped mid-step when he saw the expressions on their faces. His eyes followed their gaze to the object on the post. He said nothing, but his grip on the bucket tightened.

Halward came last. He crossed the yard in silence, the rhythm of his steps even as ever. He looked once at the effigy, then again more closely, his expression unreadable. He did not speak. He did not touch it.

Oswin broke the silence. "It’s a forest binding."

Simon glanced at him. "Is it a curse?"

"A mark," Oswin replied. "Could mean grief. Could mean warning. Could be both."

"It’s nonsense," muttered Hob Colling from the barn door, pulling his cloak tighter around his thick shoulders. "Old wives' tales with sticks and feathers."

Halward’s voice came quiet but unyielding. "It’s not nonsense. Not to the ones who left it."

He turned his gaze on Simon and Hob. "Saddle up. First patrol rides as planned."

Simon hesitated, clearly rattled. "You want us to ride with that thing hanging over the yard?"

Halward met his eyes without blinking. "Yes. You’ll ride faster for it."

There was a faint pause, filled only by the breath of horses and the crackle of frost. Oswin stepped forward and carefully unknotted the thread binding the effigy to the post. His fingers worked gently, as though unwrapping something sacred or dangerous. He lowered it into a burlap satchel without a word and turned away, heading back toward the chapel without looking back.

The yard slowly resumed its rhythm, but something had shifted. The men spoke in quieter tones. Even the horses, usually restless before patrol, seemed subdued. Saddles creaked. Steel buckles clicked. Hooves scraped against the frozen ground.

When Simon and Hob rode out, their mounts snorted nervously, ears flicking toward the forest as though listening for some sound not yet spoken. No one waved. The gate swung slowly shut behind them, the iron hinges groaning under the weight of the cold.

Halward remained in the yard long after they’d gone, the pale smoke of their breath still lingering like the trace of an old fire. He stood unmoving, eyes fixed on the empty post and the shadowed trails that wound into the waiting woods. His breath curled into the morning air, but he did not speak.

Out beyond the tree line, the forest was still. But something watched.

***

The chapel was quiet, its stone walls steeped in the scent of pine ash and old wax. The fire had burned low, casting long shadows across the flagstones. Tomas lay curled on a pallet near the altar, his face pale, his breath shallow. The bandage around his hand was dark and damp, the linen beginning to sour. Fever clung to his skin.

Oswin knelt beside him, murmuring quiet prayers as he pressed a cool cloth to the boy’s brow. Each movement was careful, almost priestly—less like tending to a wound and more like guarding a flame that guttered in the wind.

Wilmot hovered nearby, arms crossed tightly, more for comfort than defiance. His eyes kept drifting to the boy’s hand, the missing finger, the way the pain never seemed to fully let go. He didn’t speak. He didn’t know how.

The chapel door creaked, though no wind stirred.

Rafe o’ the Hollow stepped inside, silent and sudden. He moved with the presence of something both living and beyond life. The fire dimmed as he crossed the threshold. Arrow shifted high above in the rafters, wings rustling, but did not cry.

Oswin rose slowly.

“I knew you’d come,” he said.

Rafe nodded once, his eyes fixed on Tomas. “The wound is not clean,” he said. “If the rot takes him…”

He trailed off. The silence that followed said what he would not.

Oswin’s jaw clenched. “He’s only a boy.”

Rafe looked away, toward the narrow chapel windows. “The forest does not weigh age. But it remembers waste. And a boy who dies in pain, without peace—that memory festers deeper than flesh.”

Wilmot stepped forward. “Where would you take him?”

Rafe’s gaze returned to Tomas. “To Rowenna,” he said. “She of the white thread. She heals what others fear to touch. If healing can be had, it will be by her hands.”

“A witch?” Wilmot asked, uncertain whether to fear or hope.

“A healer,” Rafe replied. “Of leaf and bone. She does not ask for silver.”

He turned to Oswin. “He carries no coin.”

“I know,” Oswin said.

He reached into his cloak and drew out a token—smooth, pale wood, carved in the shape of a weeping willow. Its lines were clean and old, the mark of a keeper who had paid such debts before.

“For Rowenna,” he said. “For his life.”

Rafe took it without hesitation, nodding once.

Then, from within his own cloak, he retrieved another token—stone, cracked down its center, dark as river slate. He placed it gently in Oswin’s palm.

“A debt,” he said. “The weight will return.”

Oswin looked down at the stone, then closed his hand around it. “So be it.”

Rafe bent beside Tomas and lifted him with reverence, wrapping him in a fur-lined cloak of woven thistle and barkcloth. Tomas stirred faintly, but did not wake.

Wilmot stepped forward, eyes wide. “Let me come with you.”

Rafe looked at him—long and deep. “Not yet. You’re still of the stone. Your name has not yet been called.”

He turned to leave, the door creaking open without touch. Mist curled inward across the chapel floor.

At the threshold, Rafe paused.

“Pray that he lives.”

Then he stepped into the gray beyond.

Oswin looked up at the rafters, where Arrow still perched, feathers dark against the stone.

“Follow,” Oswin said, quiet but firm. “See they arrive safely.”

Arrow tilted his head, eyes catching the chapel firelight. For a long breath, he didn’t move—only studied Oswin with a strange, knowing stillness.

Then, with a single beat of his wings, he launched into the air and vanished through the open door.

Oswin and Wilmot stood in the doorway, watching the shapes fade into the woods.

The fire behind them flickered. The cot lay empty.

***

The frost had begun to melt beneath the midday sun, but only just. Shadows still held the cold, and the mist that clung to the treetops had not yet lifted. It lingered like breath upon the forest's lips, curling and fading with a will of its own.

The gate remained closed.

Wilmot stood just within it, broom forgotten in his hands, watching the tree line.

Then they appeared.

Hob Colling and Clement Ferren rode out of the mist, hooves muffled by thawing earth. Their mounts moved at a steady pace, but both men sat stiff in their saddles—upright, alert, their eyes drawn more behind than before them.

Oswin stepped into the yard, squinting toward the returning figures. He said nothing as they passed under the arch, only watched as they dismounted without words.

Clement moved slowly. His face was pale beneath the flush of windburn, and one glove hung loose from his belt, forgotten. Hob said nothing at all—only handed off the reins and began to unbuckle his gear with rigid, deliberate movements.

Oswin approached them quietly. “You were gone near four hours.”

Clement nodded. “We rode to the western bend. The trail was clear.”

“And?”

Clement hesitated. His eyes flicked toward the trees. “There was… a place. Off the trail. Neither of us remembered it. A yew tree, split at the base, but still standing. Something hung from the branches.”

Oswin’s brow furrowed. “What sort of something?”

“A nest, maybe,” Clement said. “But not made by bird or wind.”

He licked his lips, then continued. “It was woven. Twigs, hair, bits of bone. Strung up with thorn vine. Hung just high enough to be seen, just low enough to be feared.”

Wilmot stepped closer. “Did you touch it?”

“No.” Clement shook his head quickly. “We didn’t get that close. We heard—”

He stopped.

“Hob heard it too,” he added after a moment. “A creaking. Like rope under weight. But nothing moved.”

Oswin’s gaze drifted toward Hob, who met it for a moment, then looked away.

“You did well to return,” Oswin said.

Clement opened his hand. Caught between his fingers was a twig—short, blackened, bound at one end with a scrap of red thread. He didn’t speak, only held it out.

“I found it tucked into my cloak,” he said. “Didn’t feel it until we were nearly back.”

Oswin took it with care and walked to the brazier. He tossed it into the coals. It hissed, popping sharply as the thread curled and vanished in smoke.

Wilmot stepped closer. “What was it?”

“A message,” Oswin said softly. “One not meant for us to keep.”

Clement sat down on the edge of the water trough, shoulders sagging. “It wasn’t fear,” he said quietly. “Not exactly. Just… we didn’t belong there.”

From the stable doors, Halward emerged, arms folded beneath his cloak. His face gave nothing.

“Did you see anything?” he asked.

Hob finally spoke. “Nothing that stood still long enough to name.”

Halward nodded once. “The forest let you return. Remember that.”

No one spoke after that.

Wilmot looked at Clement, whose hand now trembled where it rested on his knee. He did not ask what he saw.

Some things didn’t need speaking.
The forest had looked back.

***

The sun was already leaning westward by the time Simon Braye and Alan Wode rode out from Woodgate. Their cloaks snapped in the cold breeze that funneled down the old Forest Road, and the hooves of their horses struck a dull, frozen rhythm into the half-thawed earth. The chapel bell had not yet rung None, but the shadows of the trees had grown long and eager, reaching across the road like dark fingers.

Halward had sent them off with few words, standing just beyond the stable doors with arms folded beneath his cloak. “You know the road,” he said. “Stay to it. Speak little. Be back before dark.”
No ceremony. No blessing. Just the old rule of the gate.

The forest, he’d said once, remembered everything.

Now, a mile along the main Forest Road, Simon and Alan rode in uneasy silence. The trail was broader than the winding footpaths of the eastern thickets, but no less forsaken. Deep ruts from forgotten carts pocked the ground, and bramble-choked ditches lined either side. Frost clung to the low branches of birch and ash where the sun had not yet broken through.

Simon rode with his head slightly bowed, eyes scanning each bend with quiet dread. A squirrel leapt across the path and disappeared into shadow. A crow flapped overhead and vanished without calling. The silence pressed like a hand to the throat.

Alan shifted in his saddle. “You’d think the King might spare coin for a proper road crew.”

Simon didn’t answer.

Alan sniffed. “All this talk of forest tokens and witch-signs. It’s just stories to keep folk frightened and taxes high.”

Simon’s gaze drifted to a twisted elm where something had been carved into the bark—deep gouges like claw marks, long scabbed over. “You didn’t see what I saw yesterday.”

Alan smirked. “I saw a doll made of straw and rabbit bone. I’ve seen worse hanging from a midwife’s door.”

He tugged at the wolf-tooth talisman around his neck. “The forest makes strange things. Doesn’t make them sacred.”

Simon said nothing. He could feel it in his bones now—the weight of the woods, thickening with every step. The wind had stopped moving. The light seemed to bend around the boughs instead of through them.

Then they rounded a bend—and stopped.

The Forest Road ahead was blocked.

An overturned cart lay across the track, its wooden slats shattered and spoked wheel cracked at the rim. A dead mule slumped beside it, its eyes crusted in frost, tongue blackened and curled. A few splintered crates lay scattered, their contents spilled like entrails: cracked pottery, grain soaked in thaw, a small wrapped bundle torn open and empty.

Alan let out a low laugh. “You see? Just rot and happenstance.”

Simon did not laugh. “No blood. No drag marks. No wheel tracks. It’s too clean.”

Alan was already dismounting. “You let your nerves ride ahead of you, Braye. Happens to men when the trees get too quiet.”

He stepped toward the cart, his voice still carrying the thread of a smirk. “Come on. We clear the mess, mark it, and return. Maybe I’ll ask Halward for double watch pay.”

Simon opened his mouth to speak—but the forest moved first.

A sound like a split in the air. Thwip.

The arrow struck Alan in the throat just above the collarbone, driving deep. He staggered, mouth opening in shock. His sword fell. His knees buckled. He collapsed hard against the frozen earth and did not move again.

Simon froze. Another arrow hissed past him and shattered bark from a tree behind.

That broke the spell.

He wheeled his horse and kicked hard. The beast reared, then thundered down the road, hooves pounding mud and slush.

Branches tore at him. Mist slapped his face. He did not look back.

Behind him, the forest closed.

***

The clearing was still.

Alan Wode’s body lay where it had fallen, blood pooling black across thawed ruts. The trees stood quiet. Nothing stirred.

Then a figure stepped from the forest.

David of Doncaster—slender, swift-footed, hooded in grey and green—moved across the road like a shadow come loose. He crouched beside the corpse. His face showed no triumph. No fury. Only purpose.

He drew a long, narrow blade and set it carefully to Alan’s wrist. The knife worked quickly. The forest watched, and said nothing.

When the hand came free, the body fell aside with a dull thump.

David stood.

“Justice,” he said, not aloud, but clearly—so the trees would hear.

He crossed to a bare alder and placed the severed hand against it, palm outward, fingers splayed. He drew a single nail from a pouch and drove it in with a small mallet—each strike clean, measured, final.

He tied a red strip of cloth around the wrist, knotted tight. Then he stepped back, looked once more toward the body, and vanished into the underbrush.

The cart wheel creaked once in the breeze.

Then silence returned.

***

The gate came into view as the light failed.

Simon’s horse burst from the treeline at a desperate gallop, its sides lathered and eyes rolling. Mud clung to its legs. Frost clung to its flanks. Simon hunched low in the saddle, teeth clenched, one glove missing, his cloak torn down the back as if the forest had tried to keep it. Blood—someone’s—was smeared along his cheek, dried in a crooked line.

Oswin saw him first.

He was at the brazier, stirring coals, when the sound of hooves cracked the quiet. He dropped the iron rod and stepped forward. Wilmot followed, grain sack half-tied in his arms.

Simon did not slow until the last moment. He hauled the reins hard, and the horse half-stumbled in the slush. He slid from the saddle, boots skidding on the thawed yard, and staggered toward the gatehouse, breath coming in gasps.

“Open the gate,” he rasped. “Halward—get Halward—sound the bell—”

Oswin reached him. “Simon. What happened?”

Simon looked at him, eyes glassy. His mouth opened, closed. Then a single word fell out:

“Dead.”

Behind him, the horse snorted and shook its head, steam rising from its back like smoke from a struck forge.

Halward emerged from the far end of the yard, already fastening his cloak. His boots crushed frost as he walked, steady and fast. Hob and Clement appeared behind him, called by the bell rope Wilmot now yanked in frantic bursts.

Halward spoke low and clear. “Talk.”

Simon nodded, once, twice. His jaw worked. “The cart. On the main road. Looked broken. Mule dead. Alan dismounted, went forward. I told him it was wrong. Too clean. Then—”

He broke off, chest heaving. Oswin gripped his shoulder.

“Take your time,” the old man said.

Simon closed his eyes. “I heard the arrow. Didn’t even see it first. Just the sound. Alan—he dropped. No time. Another arrow came past my head. I didn’t wait. I ran. I rode.”

Halward’s voice was even. “Did you see them?”

Simon looked up. “No. Just shapes. Shadows. The woods swallowed them. It wasn’t a fight. It was a killing.”

Halward turned to the others. “Saddle what you can ride. Light gear only. We go before the frost hardens again.”

Clement hesitated. “Do we know who did this?”

“No,” Halward said. “But they left their answer.”

He looked back to Simon. “You said nothing moved after?”

Simon nodded. “It went still. Still as a grave.”

Halward turned to Wilmot. “Gate stays shut. No one in, no one out. If Oswin says open, you open. Otherwise, you keep it barred.”

Wilmot swallowed. “Yes, Warden.”

Halward swung up into the saddle that Hob had brought around. His voice rang out across the yard.

“We ride to the body.”

No one cheered. No one shouted.

The gate opened, slow and groaning, and the men rode out beneath a sky the color of old lead.

Behind them, the chapel fire hissed in its hearth.

And above it, the bell still rang.

***

The frost had returned. It clung to the grasses beneath the trees and dusted the ruts of the Forest Road like white ash. Mist hung low, stirring at knee height, and the branches above were motionless.

The cart was still there. So was the mule.

So was Alan.

His body had not been moved. He lay on his side where he had fallen, eyes glazed and half-lidded, mouth open, arm bent beneath him like a broken doll’s. The arrow was gone.

But the hand remained.

Nailed to a tree just off the road, low to the ground—one long, black iron nail driven straight through the wrist. The hand hung limp, palm outward, fingers splayed as if pleading. A strip of red cloth had been tied tight around the base—offering or curse, it was impossible to know.

Halward dismounted in silence. Clement and Hob followed, grim and slow. Simon stayed with the horses a few paces back, his knuckles white on the reins. Halward had said nothing to him, and that silence was enough.

He approached the tree. The frost creaked under his boots. He studied the nailed hand. His own—scarred, calloused—lifted and hovered just beneath it, not touching. The red cloth stirred in the breathless air.

“They’re still here,” he said.

An arrow sliced the world.

It struck Hob in the thigh and dropped him instantly with a shout. Another hissed past Halward’s ear and buried deep into the tree, quivering just above the hanging hand.

Clement yelled and dropped, scrambling behind the cart. Hob dragged himself with clenched teeth, blood streaking the ruts. Arrows snapped into the wood. A cry in the trees—high, wordless, not human.

Simon ducked and clutched the reins, too stunned to move.

Halward stood. Still.

Another arrow flew. He didn’t flinch.

Instead, he drew his blade.

It came from the sheath with a whisper like breath drawn before a killing blow. The steel caught no light, only shadow.

He moved into the trees.

Not quickly. Not recklessly.

With purpose.

He passed between roots and branches like a force older than language. His boots made no sound. The forest did not resist him. It accepted.

All of Halward’s practiced control—every measured breath, every prayer, every withheld blow—let loose in a single moment of blood and death.
He became not a man, not a warden, but a reckoning long delayed.
The sword did not swing wildly.
It knew the way.
And it had been waiting.

The first man barely turned before Halward's sword entered his side and exited through his ribs. He gasped once, and the Warden moved on.

The second stood his ground and raised an axe. Halward didn’t break stride. He knocked the weapon aside, stepped close, and brought his blade down through collar and heart. The man fell in two motions—his body, then his scream, severed.

A third man stumbled back, hands raised. “Please—”

Halward did not hear him. He did not stop. The blade went in clean. The body crumpled to its knees.

He did not breathe heavily. He did not speak. His heart did not race.

There was no rage in him.

Only order. Cold, clean order.

He was not the Warden now.

He was the crusader.

He was death.

In the mist, across the clearing, one figure remained.

A bow lowered. As it did, his hood fell back.

David of Doncaster.

For a breath, they looked at each other—soldier and ghost, Warden and exile. Recognition passed between them, quiet and final. Two predators.

David turned and ran.

Halward stepped forward once.

Then stopped.

The forest swallowed David without protest.

Halward lowered his sword.

The mist was quiet again. The frost unbroken. The trees, still.

Behind him, Clement was helping Hob to his feet.

Halward turned back toward the road.

It was over.

***

The clearing was still.

The fog had thinned with the dying light, parting just enough to show the truth of what remained. Blood darkened the ruts in the road. Broken arrows jutted from the earth like grave markers. The cart stood tilted, its wheel cracked, half-filled with silence and the scent of iron.

Halward knelt by the tree.

With steady hands, he pulled the long black nail free from the bark. Alan’s severed hand came away limp, still marked with the red cloth, fingers curled slightly inward as if in shame.

He wrapped it in a strip of linen, folding the cloth twice before tucking it inside his cloak. He stood without sound.

Clement approached from the road, one arm beneath Hob’s shoulder, guiding him forward. Hob’s face was pale, jaw clenched, his leg wrapped tight with a strip of his own torn tunic.

Simon emerged from the trees a few paces behind. His eyes went to the bodies before they reached Halward’s. He didn’t speak. He simply stepped forward and began to lift the dead.

They came to the three fallen attackers.

Hal didn’t know their names.

He doubted anyone would say them aloud again.

One was barely older than Wilmot—a boy in patched boots and a tunic three winters too small. Another’s face was streaked in dried red ochre, painted in crude lines of battle that had not saved him. The third lay sprawled on his side, his hand outstretched toward the boy’s body.

Halward paused beside him, brow furrowing.

A guess. A weight.

The boy’s father, perhaps.

He said nothing.

The sword in his hand felt heavier than it had in battle.

They lifted the bodies carefully and laid them in the cart. No one spoke.

They came to Alan last.

Halward knelt beside him. The frost had begun to cling to the fabric of his cloak. Alan’s eyes were half-closed, his mouth still open from the moment he’d fallen.

Halward reached down, touched his forehead once, and then gently shut his eyes.

He removed the wolf-tooth talisman from around Alan’s neck. For a moment, he held it in his hand.

Then he placed it back into Alan’s palm, curled the fingers around it, and let it rest there.

They lifted him together.

The cart creaked under the weight.

Halward did not mount. He walked beside it, the linen-wrapped hand beneath his arm, his sword still drawn in the other.

Clement took the reins.

Simon followed behind.

No one spoke.

The road back to Woodgate opened like a wound.

The mist parted as they passed.

And behind them, the forest was quiet.

Abstract Tooth No. 1 (n.d.)

I believe that pain is the body’s way of asking for help—and that eventually that help would come. You know, like a courteous knock on the door followed by a polite, white-coated professional who says, “Ah, yes. I see the problem. Let’s fix that.” Especially when the pain lives in your mouth—one of the most annoying, expensive, and hard-to-ignore locations possible.

But apparently, I was mistaken.

Today, while eating lunch, a molar on the right side of my mouth cracked. Not a cute little chip. Not a “well, that’s unfortunate” kind of break. No. This was a crack—the kind you feel all the way up into your jaw and deep into your soul. One minute I was enjoying some tater tots; the next I was holding my jaw like Hamlet with his skull, contemplating the fragility of life.

And the worst part? I told my dentist. I told him it hurt. I told him months ago. He poked around, tapped it with that tiny hammer, shrugged, and said, “Its filled. Looks fine to me.”

I believed him. He had a degree, after all. And one of those polite dentist voices that makes you feel like you're being both soothed and mildly judged. I wanted to trust him. He had been my dentist since my first tooth; 40 years. 

Then he retired.

Just… disappeared. No forwarding address for my shattered trust. No farewell note saying, “Hey, sorry about the molar.” Now I’m left with a broken tooth and a new dental office where the receptionist sounds chipper enough to host a cooking show and I’m not even sure they take my insurance now. 

What’s been echoing in my head all day, oddly enough, is this piece of art I found recently—Abstract Tooth No. 1. It’s a minimalist line drawing of a tooth, elegant and unbroken, like a dental diagram done by someone who also teaches yoga. When I first saw it, I admired its smooth lines, its calm confidence. Now I look at it and think, Must be nice.

Because my tooth does not look like that. My tooth is more Picasso than minimalist. More “cubist emergency” than “dental serenity.” If this artwork were based on my mouth, it would be a jagged lightning bolt with a tiny flag that says “Oops.”

Still, I kind of love that tooth drawing. It’s aspirational. It’s what my mouth wants to be. It’s the promise of symmetry, the myth of structure, the dream of dental peace. It reminds me that somewhere, at some point, someone had all their teeth in the right places, and none of them betrayed them mid-bite.

Maybe someday, after the crown or the root canal or whatever medieval magic this new dentist recommends, I’ll get back there too. Maybe I’ll even print out that little abstract molar and hang it on the fridge as a goal. A tooth vision board.

Until then, I’ll chew on the left side.

RoboCop

Now Showing: Britain's Lost Masterpieces

Iris Corsage Ornament (1900)

Roses have always been my favorite flower. There’s something complete about them—layered, composed, ornamental yet dangerous. But irises, I’ve realized, are my second. And they hold a different kind of power. Their petals don’t spiral inward but rather burst outward, falling in graceful arcs, like silk just released. Their colors—those radiant purples, sunny yellows, and quiet whites—are the kind of colors you remember even after the bloom is gone.

There’s something less guarded about the iris. It doesn’t hide its beauty; it lets it go. And perhaps that is why it has become not only a beloved flower in my life, but a symbol in my thinking: of memory, of transformation, of the fleetingness of things that cannot be kept.

Thatis the thought I carry with me when I look at two artifacts found at The Walters Art Museum: one, a brooch shaped like an iris, made of gold, silver, sapphires, and demantoid garnets; the other, a gouache design drawing by Georges Fouquet, its lines light and gestural, its colors suggestive rather than fixed. One was delicate and flat, an idea taking form. The other was solid, weighty, permanent. Between them lived a quiet tension—the difference between inspiration and execution, between nature and artifice, between the found and the forged.

Georges Fouquet’s gouache drawing is the first gesture—a study in how to turn a natural form into ornament. It is not precise in a technical sense; rather, it is fluid. The pale blues and whites are softly blended, more atmospheric than literal. The stem bends naturally, and the leaves trail off like unfinished thoughts. It is a whisper of the final piece, a glimpse at the artist’s intention before the alchemy of jewelry-making begins.

But more than that, the sketch captures something of the living iris that the brooch cannot. It breathes. It moves. Its incompleteness feels honest, like a memory that hasn’t hardened into story. There is a humility in it. It understands that the flower itself—free, untamed—is already enough.

And yet, Fouquet knew what he wanted. The Art Nouveau movement, in which he was a leading figure, was rooted in the transformation of the natural world into wearable art. Nature wasn’t just observed—it was reinterpreted, stylized, and made intimate. The sketch is not a scientific study. It is the first turning of a wild bloom into something that can be possessed. 

The final brooch is breathtaking. Set in gold, the iris’s stem twists in a gentle curve. Leaves, inlaid with demantoid garnets, shimmer a deep green. The bloom itself is forged from silver and paved with sapphires so dark they echo the night sky. It gleams with a kind of permanence that the real flower, or even the sketch, cannot offer.

But in becoming an object of luxury, the iris is also changed. No longer rooted in soil or shifting with the wind, it becomes still. Frozen. Eternal. The sensual asymmetry of the real flower becomes measured and fixed. Its wildness is tamed. The brooch is no longer just a flower—it is a possession.

There is something almost alchemical in this transition. Fouquet’s sketch, full of breath and softness, becomes a hardened object. The intangible becomes tangible. But that transformation comes at a cost. The brooch, though exquisite, has lost the ephemeral grace of the original.

The iris has long been a symbol of transcendence. Named for the Greek goddess Iris, who connected heaven and earth, the flower has stood at the threshold between worlds. It has adorned the arms of French kings in the form of the fleur-de-lis. In Japanese art and poetry, it represents the brief but beautiful arc of life. In the Victorian “language of flowers,” the iris stood for wisdom, hope, and faith.

Yet this symbolic richness is democratized in nature. Irises bloom in ditches and gardens, accessible to any who pass. They ask nothing. They are there for the world.

But when turned into a brooch—made from sapphires and gold—the flower is transformed into something exclusive. It no longer belongs to all. It becomes a marker of wealth, of class, of ownership. What was once ephemeral and free is now rare and permanent—and no longer universally accessible.

Ruby Payne, whose work on the hidden rules of economic class has shaped how I see my students, reminds us that poverty and privilege express themselves not just in income but in access to experiences, symbols, and values. A flower in the field is accessible to anyone with eyes to see. But a jeweled brooch, displayed under glass or clasped to the lapel of the elite, speaks another language entirely.

The sketch and the jewel, placed side by side, seem to echo that gap.

I’ve grown irises. I’ve watched them rise after rain. I’ve crouched down, camera in hand, trying to capture their color before it fades. I’ve stood over the place where they once were, after the petals fall and the green turns to withered stalk. They’re fragile. That’s part of their gift. They remind us that beauty doesn’t last—but that it was here.

Maybe that’s why we try to preserve it. We draw it. We carve it. We set it in precious stones. We turn it into things we can wear, or frame, or lock away in museums. And that urge isn’t wrong. It’s just human. We want to keep what moves us.

But we should also be honest: in preserving, we sometimes lose something essential. The brooch will never wilt. But it will also never bloom.

Gazing at the brooch and the sketch, I feel something stir. The brooch is impressive. The sketch, moving. Together, they told a story—not just of a flower, but of our human longing to stop time. To freeze what is fleeting. To turn the ordinary into treasure.

But for me, the true iris still lives in memory. In that field behind my grandmother’s house. In the moment of kneeling down to watch it sway in the wind. In the knowledge that something so lovely could appear without permission, and disappear just as freely.

Maybe that is why I love irises. Because they bloom not to be possessed, but simply to be seen.

And that, to me, is the highest form of beauty.

I Wanna Hold Your Hand

Happy Caturday

The Shining

Branding Iron BBQ

Sea of Thieves Season 16: Reapers Rule

Friendship

Los Primos Mexican Grill

Under the Dome

Greenery

Added some leaves to the last three roses. It hurts like a mo fo. Like 9 little individual tattoos in my soft parts.

Forgotten Man (1934)

There are students I still dream about. Not because they were the brightest or the loudest or the most troubled—but because they disappeared. One day, they were in my classroom. Then a few days absent. Then a voicemail box that was full. Then nothing. They slipped beneath the cracks of a system already full of cracks. When I look at Maynard Dixon’s Forgotten Man, I don’t see a stranger—I see years of students, each one a different version of the same silence.

Dixon painted this during the Great Depression, but the curbside could be any American street. The man’s face is turned downward, his clothes rumpled, his posture surrendered. Behind him, the legs of passersby blur past in a flurry of motion and disinterest. No one stops. No one looks. It’s not just that he’s poor—it’s that he’s become invisible. And in that invisibility, I see the students I’ve taught: the ones who slept on friends’ couches, who hoarded lunch leftovers, who carried their trauma in silence because speaking it wouldn’t change anything. The ones who never made it to graduation. Or worse, the ones who did, and still slipped away.

What Dixon captured in oil, Ruby Payne captured in language. In her research on the culture of poverty, Payne describes how the values, resources, and even speech patterns of generational poverty differ from those of the middle class. It’s not just about money—it’s about mindset, relationships, language, and the tools for survival. In the middle class, the future is something to plan for. In poverty, the present is something to survive. When a student in poverty doesn’t do their homework, it’s not always laziness. It’s often logistics. No internet. No stable housing. No safe space. No pencil.

I’ve seen these differences play out not just in students, but in the institutions meant to help them. Our schools often reflect middle-class norms: we prize delayed gratification, written communication, hierarchical authority, and achievement for its own sake. But a student in survival mode is operating with a different rulebook. In Payne’s terms, they are fluent in relationships, resilience, and resourcefulness, not resumes and rubrics. And when these values clash, students don’t always fail the system—the system fails them.

Yet teaching at-risk students isn’t about lowering standards. It’s about changing the shape of support. I’ve learned to ask better questions. To listen for what isn’t said. To understand that a student who lashes out may not be defiant, but desperate. That the kid who falls asleep in class might be working night shifts to keep their family afloat. That trust is currency. And that showing up—every day, relentlessly—is the most radical form of teaching there is.

Sometimes, that’s not enough. I’ve lost students. I’ve watched them leave, watched them disappear into the very background Dixon paints so vividly. I’ve felt the helplessness of seeing a face in the hall on Monday and hearing about an arrest or overdose by Friday. These aren’t isolated tragedies. They are systemic outcomes. We talk about dropout rates and graduation numbers, but behind every data point is a story—a story of need unmet, potential unrecognized, a human being passed by.

And yet, there’s hope. Not the kind you paint on walls in motivational posters, but the stubborn, daily kind. The kind you carry with you when you drive a student home because their ride bailed. The kind you use to advocate for a pair of shoes or a meal voucher. The kind you summon when you call the third guardian on the emergency contact list, just to say, “They’re not alone.”

When I return to Forgotten Man, I see not just one man on a curb, but the cumulative weight of every youth we’ve failed to see. The system may move on. The crowd may pass. But I have to believe that noticing matters. That teaching—the kind that meets students where they are, with honesty and humanity—is a form of resistance.

Because to be forgotten is not just to be poor. It’s to be unseen. And every day in my classroom, I try to remember: to look, to listen, to hold space—for the ones still here, and the ones already gone.

Small Poems for Big

Small Poems for Big

By Chinaka Hodge

Twenty-four haiku, for each year he lived

when you die, i’m told

they only use given names

christopher wallace

no notorious

neither b.i.g. nor smalls

just voletta’s son

brooklyn resident

hustler for loose change, loosies

and a lil loose kim

let me tell you this

the west coast didn’t get you

illest flow or nah

had our loyalties

no need to discuss that now

that your weight is dust

that your tongue is air

and your mother is coping

as only she can

i will also say

that i have seen bed-stuy since

b.k. misses you

her walk has changed some

the rest of the borough flails

weak about itself

middle school students

not yet whispers in nine sev

know the lyrics rote

you: a manual

a mural, pressed rock, icon,

fightin word or curse

course of history

most often noted, quoted

deconstructed sung

hung by a bullet

prepped to die: gunsmoke gunsmoke

one hell of a hunch

here you lie a boy

twelve gauge to your brain you can’t

have what you want be

what you want you black

and ugly heartthrob ever

conflicted emcee

respected lately

premier king of the casket

pauper of first life

til puff blew you up

gave you a champagne diet

plus cheese eggs, welch’s

you laid the blueprint

gave us word for word for naught

can’t fault the hustle

knockoff messiah

slanged cracked commandments, saw no

honey, more problems

a still black borough

recoiled, mourned true genius slain

the ease of your laugh

the cut of your jib

unique command of the room

truthfully biggie

what about you’s small

no not legend not stature

real talk just lifespan

yo, who shot ya kid

n.y.p.d. stopped searching

shrugged off negro death

well, we scour the sky

we mourn tough, recite harder

chant you live again

of all the lyrics

the realest premonition

rings true: you’re dead. wrong

Source: Poetry (April 2015)

Link to Poetry Foundation

The Martian

Alexander and Diogenes

Alexander and Diogenes

Setting: Corinth, 336 BCE. The winds of empire have only begun to stir. Philip of Macedon lies in his tomb, and his son, newly crowned, has come south to assert his title as Hegemon of the Hellenic League. The great campaign into Asia has not yet begun. Alexander walks the earth not as its conqueror, but as its student—eager, brilliant, and still unfinished. The city hums with tension and prophecy. In the dust of an old gymnasium, where athletes once trained their bodies and philosophers sharpened their minds, a few broken columns cast long fingers of shadow over the flagstones.

A man sits amid them, unbothered by time, barefoot, rag-wrapped, brow shaded by a torn cloak. This is Diogenes. He reclines not in a bed nor on a cushion, but in a clay pot resting against the ruin of a pillar, drinking the sun like a beast warmed after winter. His only possession, a staff, rests beside him.

A procession approaches. Soldiers in polished cuirasses, their plumes trembling. Scribes, philosophers, and servants trail behind, speaking in hushed tones. At the center of this train walks Alexander, son of Philip, named for Achilles, and pupil of Aristotle. He carries himself as a man bred to be seen. Even now, he is learning how to become one.

I. The Student Comes

Alexander: There, Hephaestion. That man in the sun. Is this truly Diogenes the Dog, the one they call philosopher of poverty?

Hephaestion: It is. The one who threw away his cup when he saw a child drinking from his hands. The one who called Plato a pompous fool and lived like a beast to shame the city of men.

Alexander (gazing out across the ruin): My father conquered Greece, and I inherit her chains. The philosophers dine in silk, the orators flatter me in marble halls. But that man—he seems to dine on nothing and yet is full.

Hephaestion: You are the son of Philip. The student of Aristotle. The chosen of the gods. Why stoop to chase this dog in the street?

Alexander: Because I must be more than their heir. Achilles did not rest in his tent while Troy burned. He seized glory. I am such as he—that greatness is not given, it is demanded by fate. But now I wonder if even Achilles ever truly knew peace.

Hephaestion: Peace? You are twenty years old and crowned by thunder. The League bends the knee. The army chants your name. And you think you lack peace because a naked lunatic can nap in the sun?

Alexander (half to himself): I can conquer Babylon, but I cannot silence the unease in my chest. What if this unrest is not a flaw, but the mark of the truly great? What if all heroes carry it?

Hephaestion: Or what if it is simply hunger, Alexander. You are mortal. This man—he is not a sage. He is an excuse made flesh. He challenges nothing but the patience of flies.

Alexander: Then let me be stung. I have read the scrolls of Persia, the laws of Solon, the riddles of Egypt—and still my soul is unquiet. There is a wisdom beneath all this noise. Perhaps it waits in silence.

Hephaestion (scoffing): You speak of silence, yet chase after riddles. We prepare for war, and you prepare to kneel before a beggar.

Alexander: I do not kneel. I seek. I seek to understand what no tutor could teach me: how to live without fear. Without the weight of the eyes that watch me.

Hephaestion: Then let me speak as a friend, not as a general—do not lose yourself in the gaze of this gadfly. Your strength is in action, not retreat.

Alexander: And yet what is the point of strength, if I do not know for whom it is wielded? I carry the name Alexander, but not yet the meaning. Perhaps that, too, waits in silence.

Hephaestion (quietly): You command every shore you desire. What can he teach you?

Alexander: Everything I command, I must hold. And everything I hold, I must fear to lose. Perhaps he has learned how to let go.

II. The King and the Dog

Alexander: Diogenes. I am Alexander, King of Macedon. I come to offer you anything you wish.

Diogenes (without looking up): Then move. You're standing in my sunlight.

Alexander (startled, then laughing): Is this how you greet kings?

Diogenes: I do not see a king. Only a man with a shadow too large.

Alexander: You know who I am. And yet you speak as if titles were air.

Diogenes: They are. Names are wind. Thrones are clouds. Neither feeds the belly nor warms the bones. You come with gold, soldiers, silk—none of which I asked for.

Alexander: I have tamed the peoples of Greece, bent nobles to my will—and yet I stand here, unrecognized.

Diogenes: Better to be unrecognized than misidentified. A lion does not need applause to be a lion.

Alexander: I was told you were wise. That you mocked Plato’s definitions, that you once wandered Athens with a lantern in daylight searching for an honest man. That you live without shame or fear. And yet you lie here like a stray.

Diogenes: I am a dog, yes. But not without purpose. I bark at the vain. I chase off the greedy. I bite only liars. The city needs such a beast. Better to be a dog in the sun than a man in chains.

Alexander: Chains? You think I, of all men, am chained?

Diogenes: More than most. You are shackled by conquest, by honor, by legacy. I’ve seen many men tied by gold ropes and silken sashes. They call it dignity. I call it delusion.

Alexander: Then what is freedom?

Diogenes: Freedom is the absence of compulsion. It is to live as nature made us—without ornament, without excess. To master oneself, not others. To live without needing the praise of fools or the permission of tyrants.

Alexander: Speak plainly, philosopher. I wish to know what you know of freedom. My victories pile high, but I find I am still not free.

Diogenes: Freedom is not found on a battlefield, nor in the ashes of conquered cities. It is not forged in armor or praised by poets. It is knowing what to need—and having the courage to need less.

Alexander: Then I am still enslaved.

Diogenes: You are. To ambition. To the endless appetite for more. A man who drinks the sea will die of thirst.

Alexander: And you? Are you free?

Diogenes: I am. For I have nothing. And need even less. I sleep when I’m tired. I eat when I’m hungry. No one commands me. Not even my own desire.

Alexander (examining him): And yet they say you once lived with silver and slaves in Sinope. That you were driven out.

Diogenes: I was driven out by fools for breaking their laws—but I was already free before I left. I broke their laws to keep their money honest. I mocked their pride to remind them of death. They sent me into exile, and I laughed. A man cannot be exiled from truth.

Alexander: And what is truth?

Diogenes: That we are animals who pretend to be gods. That we wear masks and call them virtues. That wisdom is not found in books, but in simplicity. That the only honest man is the one who dares to live without a lie.

Alexander (quietly): Then let us see what lies I have brought with me.

He remains standing, eyes narrowing—not in disdain, but in curiosity, as the sun warms both men alike.

III. On the Tyranny of Desire

Alexander: But man is born to strive. To labor, to build. The great deeds of Heracles, the voyages of Odysseus—were these not driven by desire?

Diogenes: They were. And how did they end? Heracles, mad with grief, burned himself alive. Odysseus, after all his wanderings, returned to a kingdom filled with ghosts. You worship them, boy, but you forget they were broken men. Desire is a fire that warms or consumes. You have fed it until it devours your sleep.

Alexander: You mock greatness. But without it, would Athens have stood? Would cities rise from dust? What of the Parthenon, the Acropolis—testaments to our noblest hunger?

Diogenes: Testaments, yes. But also tombs. Every column casts a shadow longer than the men who raised it. I have walked through their marble halls. They echo with vanity. Athens is not noble because she built high walls, but because she questioned whether walls were needed at all.

Alexander: So you would have men do nothing?

Diogenes: I would have men do only what is necessary. Not what feeds pride, nor fear, nor greed. The bee makes honey because it is sweet to do so, not for praise. You build statues of yourself before your bones are cold.

Alexander: I build that I may be remembered.

Diogenes: And what good is memory to a corpse? Let them praise your name while your tongue rots. A man who lives for memory dies twice—once in the flesh, and again in the eyes of those who never truly knew him.

Alexander (defensive): I am not like other men. I carry the blood of kings. I was born to shape the world.

Diogenes (leaning up slightly): So said Xerxes. So said Darius. So said every fool with a sword and a dream. You speak of blood—as if blood alone makes a man noble. But it spills the same in every gutter. The world does not need shaping. It is your mind that is misshapen.

Alexander: You speak as if myth is a lie.

Diogenes: Myth is not a lie—but it is not truth. It is a torch held in a cave. It shows you shadows and calls them gods. Achilles was real—but the tales of his wrath are sung by poets who never saw his corpse. You live in the shadow of fiction, and you call it light.

Alexander: And yet it is myth that moves men. That shapes nations. A story can inspire armies to die for it.

Diogenes: Yes—and that is why I hate them. The greatest chains are those men wear willingly, forged from stories they never questioned. You say myth builds nations. I say it buries them.

Alexander (quieter): And what would you have me do, then? Abandon my destiny?

Diogenes: Abandon your delusion. Destiny is a word men invented to excuse their desires. You are not destined. You are simply alive. That is enough. You speak of crowns, but you do not yet wear your own face.

Alexander: Do you reject all civilization?

Diogenes: I reject only its pretense. I reject the banquet where men gorge while others starve. I reject the toga that hides a coward’s heart. I reject the temples where gold buys virtue and fear dresses as faith. Civilization pretends to elevate, but it often only conceals. I prefer the naked truth.

Alexander: And if I gave up my throne?

Diogenes: Then you would be like the rest of us—naked, uncertain, but finally at rest. You would sleep beneath the stars, as your ancestors did, and find that nothing was missing except the chains you once mistook for glory.

IV. On Power and Self-Mastery

Alexander: I command armies that stretch beyond sight. Cities open their gates at the whisper of my name. Is that not freedom?

Diogenes: No. That is noise. The louder you shout, the less you hear. A man who cannot sit alone with his thoughts is not a king—he is a fugitive. You are pursued by your own legend.

Alexander: I do not run. I pursue.

Diogenes: And what do you pursue? Glory? Posterity? Achilles chased both and died young. He is remembered, yes. But he is also dead. And you are not Achilles. You are a man born of dust, like all others.

Alexander: My teacher Aristotle taught that man’s highest good is to fulfill his nature through virtuous action. That the telos of man is excellence. A man must act in accordance with his function, and mine is to lead.

Diogenes: And who told you that was your function? A tutor fed by your father’s coin? If he had said your function was to kneel, would you still call it excellence? Perhaps the function of man is not to lead but to be. You act as though the world needs your shape. Perhaps it only needs your stillness.

Alexander: Stillness builds nothing. It writes no laws, leaves no cities. It is a philosophy of sleepwalkers and drunks. I cannot be still—I am a river in flood.

Diogenes: And what happens to rivers in flood? They drown fields, tear down homes, sweep away the lives of those who once drank from them. Would you call that nature fulfilled?

Alexander: I build that men may rise above nature.

Diogenes: And in doing so, you forget what they are. You crown beasts and call them kings. You polish stone and forget the blood beneath it. Every empire is built on bones. Yours will be no different.

Alexander: If I stop, I fall. If I fall, the world collapses with me. My men believe in the star I must be. If I turn inward, what happens to them?

Diogenes: Then you are not a star, but a mirror. And you fear what you will see in it. A man who lives by the eyes of others is never whole. You seek the reflection of greatness, not greatness itself.

Alexander: I would rather die shaping the world than sit idle while it decays.

Diogenes: And I would rather live unnoticed in truth than be buried in marble lies. You fear idleness. I fear pretense.

Alexander: You twist wisdom until it collapses into cynicism.

Diogenes: And you gild madness until it shines like virtue.

Alexander: But can a man be excellent without striving?

Diogenes: A man can be excellent by being content. Action born of peace is greater than action born of hunger. The good man is not he who acts most, but he who acts least from compulsion. You build because you are restless. I sleep because I am not.

Alexander: Then I am a beast?

Diogenes: No. You are a man with claws too sharp and thoughts too loud. You are not free until you can deny yourself the thing you most desire. Until then, you are still conquered—by yourself.

Alexander (quietly): There was a night, years ago, before my father died. I wandered outside the palace and found myself beneath the stars. No guards, no crown. Just me and the silence. I felt small. And light. And I thought—I could vanish now and be no one. I could be free.

Diogenes (nodding): And then they called your name, and the chains returned.

Alexander: I answered. Of course I did.

Diogenes: Then learn this: the first tyrant a man must face is not his father, nor his king—but his own name.

Alexander: You would have me throw away everything I’ve built.

Diogenes: I would have you examine why you built it. Was it for others? Or to outrun the silence?

Alexander: My silence frightens me.

Diogenes: Because it speaks truth. And truth is the one thing your victories cannot conquer.

Alexander: You rule no one.

Diogenes: I rule myself. You rule cities. Tell me—whose kingdom is harder to keep?

Alexander: Yours is small.

Diogenes: And yet it is never breached.

Alexander (after a long pause): And if I walked away from it all? My titles, my crown, my campaigns—what then?

Diogenes: Then you would have to meet yourself for the first time. And that is the bravest conquest of all.

A long silence passes between them. The breeze stirs the dust. Neither man moves.

V. The Light and the Shadow

Alexander: You shame me.

Diogenes: No. Your soul does that. I merely reflect it back, as still water reflects the face. You wear a crown of ambition and wonder why it weighs you down.

Alexander: And yet you sit here, dusty, half-naked, mocked by children, owning nothing.

Diogenes: The children see clearly. They laugh not because I lack wealth, but because I do not want it. They do not mistake silk for wisdom, nor palaces for peace. I own myself. That is wealth enough.

Alexander: There is something in you I cannot master. I have broken kings, silenced philosophers, marched across deserts, and yet you—here in your filth and sunlight—you bend for no man.

Diogenes: Because I bend for no desire. You fight to rule men. I live so that nothing rules me.

Alexander (quietly): What if I do not know who I am without my name?

Diogenes: Then your name has devoured you. You do not wear it. It wears you.

Alexander (pauses): And you? Who are you, really?

Diogenes: I am the man who moved aside for no one—save the sun. The only ruler I recognize casts no shadow. He demands no obedience, and yet all life turns toward him.

Alexander (looking down): If I were not Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenes.

Diogenes (smirking): And if I were not Diogenes, I would still ask you to move.

A silence passes. The sun remains. Alexander does not speak again until he feels its warmth return to his face.

Epilogue: The Shadow Cast

The sun hangs low. The day has turned gold. Alexander and Hephaestion walk in silence down a dusty path, leaving behind the colonnade where Diogenes still reclines, untouched by time, untouched by power.

Hephaestion: You saw your philosopher. Are you satisfied?

Alexander (after a pause): He offered me nothing. And yet, I leave with something I cannot name.

Hephaestion: He mocked you, insulted your father, and told you to get out of his light. Is that the wisdom you crossed Greece for?

Alexander: He said only what was true. And that is the rarest gift of all.

Hephaestion: You’ve had truth from better-dressed men.

Alexander (half-smiling): No. I’ve had lessons, lectures, commands. He gave me something colder. Clearer. He asked nothing of me. That’s what shook me. Everyone wants something—except him.

Hephaestion: And that’s impressive?

Alexander: It’s terrifying. A man who desires nothing cannot be tempted. A man who needs no crown cannot be dethroned. What do you do with someone like that?

Hephaestion: Ignore him. As the world has.

Alexander: No. The world bows to men like me. But it listens to men like him, even when it pretends not to.

He gazes back briefly, where Diogenes is still faintly visible in the distance, bathed in sunlight.

Alexander: He sits there, wrapped in his rags, and yet—I felt more naked in his presence than I ever have in battle.

Hephaestion: Then what have you learned?

Alexander (quietly): That my name is not a triumph. It is a yoke. That I am not free—not in any way that matters. And that there is a kind of power deeper than mine. He rules no city, yet commands the sun.

Hephaestion: So what will you do? Lay down your sword and live in a barrel?

Alexander (without humor): No. I will do as I must. I will become the man the world expects. But I will remember the dog who needed nothing from the world. I will carry that in the part of me that remains unsatisfied.

Hephaestion: And if you could begin again—what would you be?

Alexander (without turning back): Were I not Alexander... I would wish to be Diogenes.

They walk on. Behind them, the sun continues its slow descent, casting one long shadow eastward—reaching all the way to Persia.