The sword had been with me for years, a blunt length of steel that I kept propped in the corner of my flat. It wasn’t a weapon in any meaningful sense, just a purchase from a time when I was younger and thought that owning such an object gave me a connection to permanence. It had weight, it had presence, but no edge. For a long time I told myself that one day I would have it sharpened, as if restoring its bite would also restore something dulled in myself.

When I saw the advertisement on Gumtree, I reached out without hesitation. The man arrived in an old truck whose bed was lined with stones, belts, and tools. He introduced himself politely enough, but there was something in the way he handled the sword that unsettled me. He turned it over slowly, studying its surface with an attention I had not expected, as though he already knew more about it than I did. “Sixty,” he said, then after a pause raised the figure. “Eighty. More work than I thought.” He ground it briefly on his wheel, sparks curling off into the air. Then he said he would need to take it away for a few days. Against my better judgment, I agreed. I watched the blade disappear into the bed of his truck as he drove off.

Days stretched into weeks. Each time I asked for an update he answered with the same promise: tomorrow. He told me once it was finished but failed to deliver. Another time he explained he needed nine more days. I marked the date, waited, and heard nothing. Whenever my phone buzzed, I half-expected that single word to appear again. The repetition gave his replies an almost ritual quality, as though tomorrow was an incantation whose purpose was to keep me waiting.

At first it was annoyance, the frustration of being strung along. But slowly the absence of the sword began to feel heavier than its presence ever had. The corner of my flat where it once leaned seemed strangely vacant, my eyes always drawn there. At night I would wake with the impression that something stood in the shadows of the room, tall and narrow. My dreams took on a strange persistence: the sword balanced across my knees, its edge glinting, as though it had returned of its own accord and was waiting for me to understand its purpose.

The longer it was gone, the more I imagined it gathering some kind of charge in the hands of the man who refused to bring it back. He was no longer just unreliable. I began to picture him bent over the blade in the half-light of his truck, grinding away at steel that resisted him. In my imagination the sword was no longer passive; it had grown intent.

Eventually I gave up on patience and went to the police. I brought messages, receipts, the thin trail of evidence I had collected. The officer at the desk listened with professional boredom until he placed a call. His tone sharpened. “You’re in possession of property that isn’t yours,” he told the man. “You’ll want to deal with this today.” I sat there, grateful to surrender the problem to authority, aware of how quickly my irritation had deepened into something more like unease.

That evening there was a knock at my door. The man stood there, paler than before, the sword held out awkwardly as though it had grown heavier. His eyes would not meet mine. “It’s finished,” he said, his voice strained. “It didn’t want to leave.” He pressed it into my hands and turned quickly away, walking back to his truck without another word.

The sword is back in its corner now. Its edge is keener, though not perfect. The steel seems darker, as if it absorbed something during its absence. When I pass too near I sometimes feel the air shift, a faint coolness against my arm. At times, in the quiet of night, I catch myself listening for a sound I cannot name, a rasping, perhaps, like stone drawn across metal.

I tell myself this is nothing more than imagination, that weeks of irritation and anxiety have left their residue on me. Still, I cannot shake the sense that in giving it up so easily, I revealed something about myself. That I am someone who lets things go, someone who waits for tomorrow to deliver what must be seized today.

The sword is sharper now, but I leave it sheathed. When I glance at it, leaning as it always has, I think less of the blade and more of the silence that seems to gather around it. It returned to me altered. Perhaps so did I.