I held stiff like a statue does, forever, aspirationally Stoic, split in half I was at last by a single water-drop of sweat slipping from my neck, licking the vagus nerve, gyrating over moguls of vertebrae, one to the next, til it met the scratching horizon of my trousers and disappeared. Dissolved into an unsexed arctic, vaporized. I leapt up and fled to the lavatory, crudely, throwing the door to its border such that it clanged as a church bell, a rooster, a cymbal crashed by a carnival monkey; I wrenched the bolt shut and leant my sordid forehead against the tile wall. Meagrely supported, placing hand over rotating shoulder, I registered half-lame the visage opposing me, the face with the thin skin of an apple, both sallow chartreuse and patched over with a muted blush. And shining. By virtue of a layer of wax. A wax face, coming away from me. Uninhabited. I clamoured in vain for my absent dishrag. And low in my throat something cut, something of many facets and vertices and perfect geometry, something that could be none other than a jewel. A jewel, a clear diamond, as lonesome in its completion as a key carved of striated stone millenia ago and rendered eternal, taken to its formal conclusion, by immeasurable pressures and survival through climates known only in Hell... that was the divinity of the jewel. And it stuck in my throat, it stopped up my air, it bled me out where no one could see. And it consigned me to silence. For all that I retched, it only seemed to embed itself more surely in the pipe of my larynx. As unbeknownst to me I had long since commenced my withering, and continued with each passing day, for in spite of forced quietus I loved the jewel, loved its beauty I knew but could not glimpse, and I wished to keep it clean. I was to disintegrate but my neck remained strong and vital. Though speechless. And I became dumb and ugly, and I felt the resentment of the eyes that moved over me, and I heard their speechlessness, theirs and mine, I, so terrible to gaze upon, and they, so cruel, and it was in this hateful silence that we tacitly forgave each other and took upon ourselves the weight of our judgments. And we moved over each other and out of habit I did not speak and as I was so ugly no one knew I had an immortal jewel in my throat.