An Imagined Knife
Fiction slices
butter with a thin blade.
Non – Fiction
hangs, draws and quarters the low-fat, medium salty condiment.
Part 1:
After a long, slow
bleed of witty words and pithy sentences, the cut healed itself and then I had
to tear open the scorched flesh, but the pain froze me. When writing doesn’t
deliver itself like a small mouse sprinting over my keyboard, firing out word
after word, writers block swells in my mind like a helium balloon about to
explode in a shoebox. The tension put pressure on the spine and poked the base
of the balloon with a thin needle. When the balloon bursts, I sat in the corner
of the box and drew a map to where my hand took me.
In the box, I cut through a circle in
the side and discover hundreds of walkways to stroll down. The satisfaction
fills my head, ears and nostrils. A sigh cleared stress out of my body from the
neck up. The world outside of the box was rampant with novelists, aspiring
fiction writers and children with powerfully intangible imaginations. I start
walk among them with eager feet. I didn’t want to miss the passing visions of
the children or literary geniuses of the novelists because these moments are
like a cloud dancing for a second because it knows the moon isn’t watching. I am
an aspiring fiction writer with ideas I have in my mind and stories I haven’t
discovered yet, clinging to my ears with sharp fingernails, fearful of the fall
to the concreteness below. There is a
door to my left, which is labeled “Non-fiction”.
I sensed the solid facts
spread across the floors and the shiny tape recorders playing interviews with
protesters and government officials on a loop. The vast space with
possibilities sewn into the pockets in our jeans left me in a catatonic state.
No one talked to each other for years at a time. We had a small clock hidden
under a floorboard half way between here and the realists to provide a sense of
time while building our scenarios. A story should feel like a timeshare
vacation villa in the Caribbean with 360-degree views, where you can stay for
months at a time.
As I left this plain, drawing board space. I created a scene for
myself. Simple but just strange enough, a city where I can observe characters
and look at a book. The yellow New York City taxies began to form around me. A
street lamp was near by and an angry woman chain smoking and talking to her
boyfriend about 3 ft. away. It rained heavily on the dark streets. To avoid the
down pore, I ran into the bar across the street. I imagined the city how I wanted
it to be. I was the writer, director, producer and camera crew of my own
alternate reality, so my fantasy was my ideal circumstance.
I love the feeling of being sucked into a story. The sensation where
my face moves with each turn of the page while my skin is vacuumed by the
subliminal prose was smooth and seamless. I sought out the surrealism like a
powerful auction house seduces a best selling Author. I sat in the bar, drinking a tumbler of aged
whiskey, the words slithered into my mind and my emotions trickled from my eyes
down my defined cheekbones.
The bar tender said, “Would you like another?” His charm and intense
charisma enticed me. He stood in front of me, as he juggled glasses and made martinis.
“Yes. Make it a dirty martini.” I replied. “You got it!” he said with
continuous enthusiasm. He introduced
himself as Sunny. I enjoyed his flirtatious behavior. It was nice to be the
only women left in the bar and I didn’t think he would be interested in the
old, cougar that sat a few stools down with a lollipop in her mouth, trying
desperately to be sexy. “Call me Zee,” I said as the last drop of whiskey
tenaciously fled to my stomach. He
handed me a martini with two black olives in it. By now the bar was empty and
so he left the bar and sat next to me.
“I have what you want.” He said.
“And what is that exactly?”
“Your hotel room key.” He replied
We left the bar and walked down 72rd street together. The
drizzle settled on my lips like light condensation on a plastic pen. We jumped in a cab. “The hotel is in Greenwich
village. Let’s go straight there.” I went along with it because the force of
his grungy, Cobain look sent a shudder through my thighs.
I had his ego in the palm of my hand. We arrived in the yellow cab, which was like
riding in a Trojan horse and went to the front desk. The man behind the glass
had a knife in one hand and a coffee mug in the other. He said “Must stay alert
you know!” and looked us up and down with a pumpkin, carved out smirk on his
face. Then he said, “1 room with a double bed?” I laughed at his
presumptuousness and said “Sure. How much is it for the night?”
“30 bucks. Would you like to pay an extra 10 dollars for the
honeymoon package?” He ripped open a cardboard box with his knife and retrieved
a flyer. It advertised breakfast in bed and a foot massage. I said “no thanks,
better not to be disturbed.” I paid him and we went to room 110. The room smelt like lavender and tequila, a
pleasant and nauseating scent combined. While he was in the bathroom I tied my
hair in a ponytail, tied my left wrist to the bedpost and lay down in my underwear.
He came out with a zipper over his mouth and invisible plugs in his nose. His
eyes were sharp and unblinking warped ovals like watching a spinning hoop disorientated
and drunk. He read my signals and lay on top of me. His hard, rigid body
pressed against mine like a wooden stamp on transparent rice paper. He moved on
me, back and forth like an autistic sailor rowing a boat against a rough
current on Lake Tahoe. My lungs compressed together and used the minutes of
back up oxygen so I could slice open his jugular like a fresh packet of steak
medallions, raw and clean. His head was a puppet and I slid my arm into his
absent throat. The bartender’s vertebrae turned to dust, which formed a
gluttonous paste on my fingertips, like lake scum. He hadn’t removed himself
from me but the boat had stopped rowing. I untied myself and placed his corpse under
the bed away from view but his earthy, green fragrance clung to the paddle of
the small vessel with limp passion.
Part 2:
I sat at the bar and struggled to open the sachet of deactivated
anthrax. I asked a waiter for some scissors and he handed me a pair of blunt
kindergarten sheers. I stabbed the plastic with the toothpick tool and poured
the yellow powder into a whiskey sour. “Just a flavor enhancer,” I said as the
waiter examined my precision. “My mother was a knife thrower!” I exclaimed as
he ripped my comment out of his ears and walked away. I took a sip to protect
my credibility. My target was mulling over a cocktail menu at the other end of
the restaurant. The simmering buzz of burdened housewives and litigators,
taking a load off hid my bludgeoning intent. I handed a waiter the drink and
said, “give this to the man over there” I pointed in my victim’s direction. He
took twenty-two sips in twenty minutes. I watched his mouth slobber on the edge of the
crystal glass in decadence.
I usually found it seamless to end someone’s life, because I chose
the people who deserved it. I am like a knife spinning around a game board
wheel, not a just game. It is fixed I decide who I kill and everyone else is
caught in their hotel rooms with a hundred pounds of blow, sucking up the remnants
off the wet carpet. When they are off their game, it’s like ripping away a T-
bone steak from an overweight tiger. The
bar was mostly empty and it smelt like black tar covered in bloody juices like
a rotten, dirty snow cone melting in a mud puddle.
The hunting ground had lost its appeal so I went home. I looked in
the mirror in my bathroom and watched as scratches appeared on my face. Above
my right eyebrow, it looked like floor boards were tearing themselves up. The
shredded wood fell to the floor. “Too much booze!” I said. And splashed my face
with hot water. A sting burned my face for three seconds and then I felt
refreshed. I took off my black dress, which had anxious rips in the side and
put on a T-shirt with the words “Just rip the band aid off” on the back. My bed
felt like a preemptive coffin. The panicking air around me clung to the
oxygenated cliffs.
Part 3:
The blank,
uninspired walls surrounded me. Their passive aggression echoed throughout the
space. I was at the drawing board again and my purple crayon was chipped.
Colorful splinters lay on the ground next to my foot. I wrote down Murder and
circled it on the wall opposite me. My
ideas flooded the vicinity of the circle. Hidden. Rope. Infection. Slime. The
words arranged themselves on the wall as if led by an outside source.
The bleak, desolate landscape formed
around me like a welcomed invasion of macabre images. The Scottish mores were
wet and a squelchy. There was a castle ahead on a hill. Its gothic exterior
matched the atmosphere of the place. I walked a mile through the field and came
to the door of the grandiose structure. The door was scratched as if a dozen,
ferocious felines sharpened their claws. I took a pin out of my hair and picked
the lock, which was a façade to ward off fools. I ignored the subtle sign of
dead bodies on the refrigerated, stone floor. My name etched itself into the
frozen stone and resembled cracks in an iced over pond. There was a staircase
ahead of me was made of ash and black debris. When I stood on it the ash
encompassed my feet and legs, it crawled up my torso with creepy vigor. Instead
of oxygen, my breath was soot. I was on my way to a dusty death with thin,
powdered memories. My eyelashes shredded themselves into embers that suffocated
my eye sockets. My tongue shriveled into cinders and fell on the ground in a
powerful chemical reaction.
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