Vertical Cracks //free\\ < FHD × 1080p >

You knelt down. You picked her up. And for the first time, you let the crack run all the way through you—from crown to base, from beginning to end—until there was nothing left to split.

You woke with dirt under your fingernails. vertical cracks

That night, you dreamed of the house before you were born. An empty lot. A single tree. A woman in a long coat digging a trench with her bare hands. She wasn’t burying anything. She was opening something. When she turned to look at you, her face was your mother’s, then yours, then a face you would wear in twenty years—older, wearier, with vertical lines etched beside your mouth like parentheses holding a secret too heavy to speak. You knelt down