041 — A Forged Signature | Talon Z. Gray

---

The paper felt heavy with official absence.
A blank form.
A space for a name that did not exist.

I picked up my pen. My hand shook.

To write a name here is a crime.
To leave it blank, another.

I thought of her, lost in the system, and began to write.
I gave her my mother’s name.

It was the only inheritance I had left to give.

The idea of forgery—
The act of transferring my heritage
Onto someone I had never met.

The dim light above my desk flickered.
The ink looked black on the page.

But it was blood.
This red life force spilling onto paper to give life to another.

Every letter—
A painful, deliberate, sacred act.

They think a name is just data.
They forget it’s a prayer. A spell.

You spill onto the page,
And a soul has a place to land.

All my life, I followed their rules.
Signed my own name where I was told.

But this— This blank check,
This was the first signature I’d ever written that felt true.

It demanded my ink.
And it felt red.

Every letter, a heartbeat I gave away.
Every piece of my own history to build theirs.

And then it was complete.

Now I stand among colossal, sky-piercing shelves of ledger books.
Where will I put this?

Tower One?
Tower Forty-Two?

I run my finger over the name I wrote.
It feels real.
Nestled among thousands of others.

This phantom lady,
A rootless entry with an invented past.
A fragile paper-based existence.

She exists now.
On paper, at least.
A ghost in their ledger.

Their ledger, she has a number, their number gave her a place.
Their place. Her chance.
A history I created from whole cloth.

My crime wasn’t the signature.
It was creating a life with no past.

I come here sometimes just to see her name.
To make sure the ink hasn’t faded.
To make sure she’s still real.
The Real One.

I remember when we met.

A quiet bridge no one knows about.
I handed her an official-looking brown paper bag.
It felt impossibly heavy.

She looked at her new name on the page.
She knew it wasn’t hers.

She looked up at me.
Can I carry it? she asked.

I told her, You have to.
The alternative is to be erased.
They will whisk you away into an egg-beater detention theater.
Your life, an expose of erasure.

What irony.

To give someone a name
Is to give them a ghost to live with—
Her own. And now, the one I gave her.
Both opportunity and burden.
Bittersweet, yet necessary.
In sequential staging, it buys time.
Godspeed.