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Spoken version
A recorded reading of “Sealed with a Bead”. If the player does not load, use the original audio source.
In glacial light, a mask wears human hair, a hush suspended in sea-glass blue; only a lacquered mouth insists it’s there, a siren red that burns the cool right through. No eyes to contradict, no brow to plead, a nose half-sketched, a ghost beneath the skin; from crimson shore a silver filament leads, and teaches weight to hang beneath the chin. Perhaps a life begins where features lack, a page before the ink decides its run; the lips already write the future back, a bright refusal smouldering like a sun. Then let this page of skin refuse each creed; it signs with fire, then seals it with a bead.
Alternative version
A glimmer’s grip—beneath the lacquered hush, a pulse once whispered through the kiln-fired clay. The mask forgot, but I recall the blush of breath that dared to colour shadow’s gray. No eyeholes here, but I have seen from bone, the kiln-lit cradle where no gaze could bloom. The lips were ink; the silence, etched in stone— yet still, I swelled like tide against the tomb. I was not born with name, nor line, nor creed, but coiled inside the filament of thought. A dream that bit its tethered tongue to bleed a single drop, the shape the world forgot. And that is me—the ember in the freeze, the seam between the scream and sculptor’s grace. Not face, but flame. Not mask, but shifting breeze— the soul that haunts the hollow of the face. So when they seal me in this final bead, know this: it holds no end, no faith, no pact. Just memory, and heat, and one small seed of all the selves the mask could not redact.
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