short fiction · 2026-10-26

Thresholds

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The pharmacist measures in milligrams. The poet measures in glances. The mathematician plots the curve where benefit bends into harm — the inflection point, the dose at which the heart's receptors saturate and every additional unit becomes toxin.

She kept a ledger: three messages sent, two returned, one left on read. The half-life of a promise: fourteen days. The lethal dose of silence: forty-eight hours. She calculated the therapeutic window — narrow, unforgiving — where love heals instead of hollows.

The doctor asks: how much? She answers in memories. The night he brought soup. The morning he forgot her birthday. The afternoon he held her hand through the scan results. Each moment a microdose, accumulating in tissue she cannot biopsy.

There is no antidote. Only titration: learning to survive on less, or learning to stop counting.