A Name on a Stone

He stands before the granite monolith,
a son confronting the sum of his inheritance:
a name etched into permanence,
a sterile inscription on a barren slab.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
Nothing—just as the man beneath had always been.

The stone is unyielding,
impervious to supplication or rage,
and yet it possesses more gravity,
more dignity,
than the father it commemorates.
It does not deceive.
It does not vanish.
It does not squander its existence
in cruelty or dereliction.
Its silence, austere and absolute,
is truer than any word that man ever spoke.

What an abomination of fortune,
to be bequeathed the splendour of breath,
the infinite theatre of days,
and to expend it only in desecration.
To squander tenderness as though it were refuse,
to weaponize presence into harm,
to mistake fatherhood for tyranny
and legacy for ruin.
What a prodigality of failure.
What a desecration of life itself.

He studies the inscription as though meaning might bleed from stone,
as though some clandestine wisdom
could be unearthed in the serif of a letter.
But there is nothing.
Only absence sculpted into permanence.
The monument does not conceal,
it proclaims:
here lies a man who built nothing,
who loved nothing,
who leaves behind nothing but dust.

And the son—
who carries the wreckage in his marrow,
who bears the invisible lacerations
of being raised in the shadow of such futility—
does not weep.
For grief presupposes value.
And what grief can be afforded to nothingness?

He speaks aloud to the stone,
not in reverence but in indictment.
The words are not elegy but exorcism,
an unshackling from the weight of a name
that should have meant shelter,
but meant only harm.

A name on a stone.
That is the legacy.
That is the inheritance.
That is the final, immutable truth:
nothing in life,
and now nothing in death.

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Britt Wolfe

Britt Wolfe writes emotionally devastating fiction with the precision of a heart surgeon and the recklessness of someone who definitely shouldn’t be trusted with sharp objects. Her stories explore love, loss, and the complicated mess of being human. If you enjoy books that punch you in the feelings and then politely offer you a Band-Aid, you’re in the right place.

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The Argument