Reunion at the Bleeding Table

Reunion at the Bleeding Table

On the evening when the moon hung low and copper-colored, the family returned to the house that kept their whispers in its walls. The dining room waited with a table that shimmered like a blade of glass, though it was wood beneath. The invitation had arrived without a sender, a single line scrawled in ink that smelled of iron: Come home where you belong. They came, each face a careful mask, each breath measured, as if the room itself were listening for treachery.

The table welcomed them with a soft sigh and a slow, deliberate bleed along its grain—no rain in, only a red bloom that seeped outward from the center like a tide. The grandmother, who once fed the family with stories, raised her glass and declared a toast to bloodlines, to memory, to the debt we all owe the ones who came before. Names appeared in the wineglass rims, names long forgotten except in the corridors of their own private histories. One by one, relatives took their seats, as if the chairs remembered their rightful places even when they did not.

What followed was a ritual dressed in ordinary kindness. The smoke from a candle curled into the shape of a hand; the table hummed with a low, patient frequency, as though listening for a confession it could consume. When a guest spoke, the wood answered with a tiny tremor, hinting at the truth behind the smile. A cousin rattled off a memory that did not belong to him, and the table bled again, a brighter crimson that pooled into the grooves as if tracing a family map. The mouth of the dish was not for appetite alone but for accountability; every bite carried a memory that tasted of regret and long-awaited apology.

“The past cannot be eaten, yet at the table it always feeds on you.”

By midnight, the house had learned to breathe in rhythm with the bleeding table. The siblings spoke in whispers, the aunts and uncles in approving nods, the younger ones in unsteady, hopeful tremors. The final act arrived when the last name was spoken aloud, and the table opened a new seam in its surface—revealing not silverware, but a door. The invitation was not simply to return, but to become part of the circle that never leaves, a lineage that survives by feeding on the courage of those who dare sit down at the Bleeding Table.