The air hung heavy in the valley, as though weighed down by the burden of secrets left unsaid. Beyond the murmur of the waterfall, there was silence, save for the faint rustling of leaves, as though the earth itself conspired to remain quiet, afraid to disturb the ghosts that lingered in the minds of men.

The boy—no, the man, though he never quite grew into the word—stood at the edge of the stream. The dog was there, Mishima’s dog, its paws bleeding from futile attempts to claw its way free from the jagged rocks. He didn’t know what kind of dog it was; it didn’t matter. It looked at him with eyes full of terror, and he felt nothing.

His father had been like those rocks: immovable, unyielding. A man of rules and walls, someone who believed in the clean geometry of confinement. The prison had been his kingdom, and he its keeper. His son had grown up in the shadow of that place, watching the barred windows swallow what little light reached the concrete floors.

When he was a child, the boy had asked his father what the prisoners had done.

“Everything,” the man replied. “Everything you can imagine, and worse.”

“Do they ever leave?” the boy asked.

“No,” his father said, with a finality that felt like the closing of a cell door. “No one ever leaves.”

But the father had been wrong, as fathers often are. Years later, when the old man’s body lay cold and pale in its casket, the prison gates had swung wide open, though not for the prisoners. For the boy, now a man, who fled from the shadow of those walls with the desperation of a drowning man breaking the surface.

The dog whimpered, snapping him back to the present. He crouched down by the water, the chill seeping through his boots. The dog was trapped, its body pressed against the rocks by the relentless current. It would die if he left it there, but he hesitated. He told himself it was because he didn’t know how to free it, but the truth was simpler, darker. He didn’t want to. He felt no hatred for the dog, but no love either—only an eerie indifference. It reminded him of his father’s face on the day of his mother’s funeral: a mask, expressionless, impervious to the grief that should have been there.

“I can only love you by hating him more,” he had told her once, on a night when the stars seemed closer than the ground beneath their feet. She had laughed, soft and bitter, and told him he didn’t understand love.

“Love isn’t hatred,” she said. “It isn’t theft either. It’s just—what it is.”

“What it is?” he asked, a mocking edge in his voice.

She sighed. “Love doesn’t need to be a war or a crime. You think it has to be stolen, but maybe it’s just… given.”

He had laughed then, too, but he hadn’t meant it. The laugh was a lie, like so many things he told himself to keep from admitting he didn’t know who he was. She had left not long after that night, and he told himself he didn’t care. But he did.

He reached into the icy water, his hands trembling—not from the cold, but from something else, something deeper. The dog thrashed as he grabbed hold of it, its body slick and frail beneath his fingers. He pulled, and the rocks scraped its fur, leaving streaks of blood in the water. When he finally freed it, the dog collapsed at his feet, shivering and weak but alive.

For a moment, he stared at the creature, its ribs heaving with each labored breath. Then he saw it: the peacock in the snow. It was there in the reflection of the stream, its plumage reduced to a dark silhouette against the pale ground. The image was fleeting, gone before he could decide whether it had been real or imagined. But it stayed with him, lodged in his mind like a thorn.

Later, when the dog had limped away into the woods and the shadows began to lengthen, he stood by the water’s edge once more, his reflection staring back at him.

“I am a seer,” he whispered, though no one was there to hear. “I am a liar.”

He thought of his father then, the man who had run the prison and the man who had been a prison himself. He thought of his mother, whose love had been quiet and invisible, like the air that filled a room. And he thought of her—the one who had left, the one he had loved in his own broken way.

“I don’t know who I am,” he said, and the words echoed in the stillness, carried away by the current.

And for the first time, he believed them.

<>

His father ran the prison the way a man might hold dominion over his own despair—with the rigid certainty of duty, yet trembling beneath the weight of what he could never master. He moved through the corridors like a king inspecting a kingdom of shadows, his footsteps ringing against the damp stone walls as though time itself had grown afraid to progress in his presence.

He was a man who believed in rules, in discipline, in the iron geometry of justice. To him, the prisoners were not men but broken pieces of a cosmic equation, errors to be corrected, chaos to be contained. “A man without boundaries,” he often said, his voice low but edged with steel, “is a man already lost to ruin.”

The boy had grown up in the shadow of this creed, under the hard gaze of a father who spoke of order as though it were holy scripture. There was no room for softness in that household, no space for the fragile promises of love. His mother would whisper her prayers behind closed doors, and his father would recite rules, as though prayers were an indulgence the world could not afford.

The prison loomed over their lives like a monument to suffering, its great stone walls visible from every window of the warden’s house. To the boy, it seemed that the shadow of the prison did not end where the iron gates began—it followed them into their home, their conversations, their silences.

One evening, years before the boy would leave that house and the father who ruled it, he found the man alone in his study. The room was dark, lit only by the faint glow of a single candle. His father sat at his desk, staring at an old photograph—a younger version of himself, standing at the gates of the prison, his uniform crisp, his face sharp with purpose.

“Do you ever dream?” the boy asked from the doorway, unsure why the question had risen to his lips.

His father did not look up. “Dreams are for men without responsibilities,” he said, his voice as flat and steady as ever.

But the boy, standing there, saw his father’s hand tremble as he turned the photograph over and laid it facedown on the desk.

Even now, years later, the boy—now a man—could not decide whether his father truly believed in the walls he had spent his life building. He had been a man who carried keys, and yet they had never unlocked anything that mattered. The boy had always wondered if his father feared the prisoners less than he feared the walls themselves, and whether he, too, had been trapped.

And sometimes, when the boy stood alone, staring into his own reflection, he could not shake the feeling that his father had passed that same prison onto him, the bars invisible but ever-present.