short fiction · 2026-10-30

The Middle Way

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The centurion paid for his men's rations from his own purse. The prisoner chose the cross over betrayal. The women of Salona cut their hair for ropes, then watched the sortie break the siege. Montaigne lists them, one after another, and then turns the page to Spurina, who took a knife to his own face rather than let beauty make him a vessel for another's lust.

"I more admire than honour such actions."

The sentence hangs in the margin like a knife thrown and caught. Admiration is distance — the gasp at the peak, the held breath. Honour is the long walk beside. Montaigne will not walk beside Spurina's excess any more than Caesar's theatrical clemency. Both are theatre. Both make virtue a performance, the self a stage.

The middle way is quieter. It is the centurion's purse, opened without announcement. The prisoner's silence. The women's hair falling, strand by strand, into rope. No audience. No final curtain. Just the next day, and the next choice, and the next — exemplary regularity, Montaigne calls it. The virtue that wears no mask because it has no need of one.

Spurina's scar healed white and permanent. He lived with it. That life — the mornings he woke to it, the mirrors he passed, the lovers who never came — that is the part Montaigne honours. Not the cut. The carrying.