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"Dammit!" Mr. Martin exclaimed as the beaker shattered against the wall. The white fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting his shadow across the tile floor as he removed his glasses with one hand and rubbed his eyes with his palms. This was the third time this week something had exploded and the damage had been permanent. He couldn't figure out what exactly was causing these explosions, let alone why things weren't resetting.
He lowered his hands and stared at the glass. Each piece caught the light differently, throwing small refractions onto the walls like a broken kaleidoscope. The chemical smell was strong enough to make a living person's eyes water, and he found himself grateful for the burning sensation in his nostrils. It meant something still worked.
Mr. Martin crouched down and picked up one of the larger shards. It had a clean edge, the kind that would slice through flesh with minimal resistance. He'd cut himself in this lab before, back when cutting himself meant something. Back when it meant bandages and healing and the mild embarrassment of explaining to Alice that yes, he'd been careless again with the glassware. Now it would mean nothing. Now it couldn't mean anything at all.
He closed his fist around the glass and waited. The sharp edge pressed into his palm with what should have been considerable force. Physics suggested the pressure was more than sufficient to break skin. Biology suggested his palm should split and bleed. Reality suggested neither of those things mattered anymore.
He opened his hand. His palm looked exactly as it had thirty seconds ago. Unmarked. Unbroken. Unchanged.
Mr. Martin set down the large shard and looked at the scatter of smaller pieces near the wall. Janet was outside trying to feel rain on her skin, which wouldn't work any better than his attempt to make himself bleed, but he understood the impulse. They were both grasping at sensations that had stopped being available to them. They were both trying to prove to themselves that they still existed.
The smaller shards had sharper angles. More aggressive edges. Better geometry for the task he had in mind, even though the task was impossible and he knew it was impossible and he was going to try anyway because what else was there to do on a July afternoon in 1958 when you were dead and the school was empty and you'd run out of ways to pretend you were still teaching chemistry to students who would never come back.
He rolled up his left sleeve. His watch read 3:47, frozen at the moment of his death. His death. Something had gone wrong, and it had been his fault.
He picked up a shard with a particularly vicious point and pressed it against his forearm. The pressure created a small indent in his skin. That was promising. That suggested physical interaction was still possible. He pressed harder, angling the glass so it would pierce rather than just compress. The tip should puncture. The flesh should give way. Something should happen.
The fact that he couldn't remember what he'd done made it worse somehow. It meant the failure was so complete, so total, that even his own mind had rejected it. It meant he'd been such a poor teacher, such a careless person, that the universe had decided he didn't deserve the clarity of knowing his own mistakes. All he had was the guilt and the certainty that he'd earned every bit of it.
He dragged the glass across his skin in a long, deliberate line. The motion was smooth and controlled, the kind of cut that would require stitches if it worked.
His skin split open.
A clean line appeared on his forearm, the flesh parting exactly as it should under the pressure of sharp glass against soft tissue. The wound gaped slightly, showing the layers underneath. He could see into himself, see the architecture of what he used to be. The cut looked clinical. Perfect. Real.
But there was no blood.
The cut was there. The damage was visible. But nothing came out of it. No red welling up from the wound, no drops falling to the tile floor, and no warmth spreading across his skin. Just the open line in his flesh, empty and bloodless, like someone had drawn on him with a razor and forgotten to add color. Like a diagram in a textbook. Like something that was only pretending to be an injury.
Mr. Martin stared at the bloodless wound on his arm. He didn't move. He didn't breathe, though he hadn't needed to breathe in three weeks. He just looked at the cut that should have been bleeding and wasn't, at the flesh that had opened up to reveal nothing, at the evidence that even his suffering was hollow.
This was worse than not being able to cut himself. This was being able to damage his body without any of the aftermath that made damage matter. This was consequence without accountability, injury without urgency, and punishment that demanded nothing from him except the acknowledgment that he'd failed even at this.
He made another cut beside the first. This one opened just as cleanly, just as bloodlessly. The two wounds sat parallel on his forearm like laboratory samples, like specimens he was studying. He made a third cut. A fourth. Each one split his skin with perfect precision. Each one remained empty and dry. Each one gaped open and showed him the meat of himself, but there was nothing moving inside, nothing flowing, nothing alive enough to respond to trauma.
His forearm was becoming a canvas of bloodless wounds. He kept cutting because stopping would mean accepting what he was seeing, and he wasn't ready to accept it yet. He wasn't ready to understand that this was his existence now, this halfway state where damage could occur but consequences couldn't follow. Where he could hurt himself but couldn't bleed. Where his body would split open obediently but refuse to give him the one thing that would make the splitting matter.
His hand started to cramp from gripping the shard so tightly. Even that sensation felt borrowed, like his body was remembering what cramping was supposed to feel like without actually experiencing the muscle fatigue that caused it. The feeling was close enough but not quite right. Everything was close enough but not quite right.
What he wanted was simple. He wanted his skin to split open, and it had. He wanted to see red blood well up from the wound and drip onto the tile floor, but that part hadn't worked. He wanted the sharp sting of pain that would force him to pay attention, to acknowledge what he'd done, and to face the reality of his own culpability. He wanted the wound to need tending, to require bandaging, and to take time to heal so that he'd have to think about it every day while it mended. He wanted the scar tissue that would form afterward, the permanent mark that would stay with him as evidence that he'd tried to make amends in the only way he knew how.
He wanted to bleed because bleeding was what living things did when they were damaged, and he deserved to be damaged. He deserved to carry visible proof of his failure. He deserved the consequences that came with being careless enough to die in his own chemistry classroom. Whatever he'd done, whatever mistake had cost him his life, it warranted blood. It warranted pain. It warranted something more substantial than this weightless guilt that had nowhere to go and nothing to show for itself.
But his body had given him wounds without the warranty of blood. Had given him the opening without the spilling. Had shown him that even self-destruction could be incomplete when you were already dead.
The rain was getting heavier outside. He could hear it drumming against the windows with the kind of intensity that would soak Janet through if she were still alive, but she wasn't alive, so it wouldn't. She'd stand there in the rain feeling nothing while the water passed through her clothes without wetting them, and he'd sit here in his classroom with cuts covering his arm and glass in his hand, and neither of them would succeed at the simple human acts they were attempting.
Mr. Martin gathered more shards, arranging them in a small pile beside him like surgical instruments. He tested each one methodically, checking for the sharpest points and the most efficient angles. His forearm had become an experiment. The cuts had become data. The question had evolved: not whether he could damage himself, but whether enough damage would eventually produce the reaction he needed. Whether there was a threshold. Whether bleeding required a certain depth or number of wounds or precise location.
He made more cuts. Deeper ones. The glass bit into his arm, and his skin parted, and the wounds opened up in neat little mouths that had nothing to say. His forearm started to look less like an arm and more like something else, something that had been taken apart to see how it worked. The cuts crossed each other. Intersected. Created patterns he hadn't intended.
He kept expecting blood. Kept waiting for it with each new cut, each new opening. Kept thinking that surely this one would do it, this one would be deep enough or placed correctly or wanted badly enough that his body would finally remember what it was supposed to do when damaged.
But there was nothing. Just cut after cut after cut, all of them empty, all of them bloodless, all of them proving that he couldn't even hurt himself properly anymore.
His hands were shaking now. The glass shard kept slipping in his grip. He'd made so many cuts he was running out of unmarked skin on his forearm. The wounds overlapped, creating complicated geometries of opened flesh. It looked catastrophic. It looked like something a person couldn't survive. But he wasn't surviving anything. He was just existing in this terrible state where his body would cooperate with violence but wouldn't validate it.
Mr. Martin looked at the pile of glass shards beside him, then at his arm covered in bloodless wounds, then at his watch frozen at 3:47. The cuts gaped at him. Dozens of them now, maybe more. He'd lost count. They'd stay there forever, probably. Stay open. Stay empty. Stay bloodless. A permanent record of this afternoon, of this failed attempt at accountability, of this discovery that even suffering had rules and he wasn't allowed to break them.
He understood now that this was part of his punishment. Not the inability to leave, not the endless repetition, not the crushing weight of guilt for something he couldn't remember. The punishment was being given half of what he needed. The wound without the blood. The damage without the proof. The consequence without the completion. It was being shown that he could hurt himself but couldn't make it mean anything. That he could open his skin but couldn't make anything come out. That he could try to atone, but the universe had decided atonement required blood, and blood was something ghosts didn't get to have.
He sat there with glass in his hands and cuts covering his arm and nothing flowing from any of them, and the rain kept falling, and the lights kept humming, and somewhere in the building Janet was probably discovering her own impossible limitations, her own hollow attempts at feeling human, and her own proof that death didn't end wanting; it just made wanting pointless.