Blade
Father returned from the military when I was in grade school. He looked at me with timid disdain that I had never seen him with before, and figured he just had a sad face. He visited for three weeks, during which time he spoke to me twice. The greeting was one. The second time, he came into my bedroom and saw his picture on the nightstand. He was blond and smiling and quite young. “That’s an old picture,” he said woefully, then turned off my lamp and left.
He spent his time huddled in his office, a room which had been locked my whole life. On the last night, before his scheduled return to the military, while Mother was asleep, I, in my pajamas, snuck quietly into the office. The light was off, and I heard a thud atop the desk. I crawled beneath and saw a leather sheath on the carpeted floor. Engraved on the leather were the words “US Army.” Next to the sheath was a shiny, slender knife, with a splendid wooden handle and a black blade. I picked these items up, held them to my chest, and slipped out of the room. I failed to see in the dark the blood on the knife, or Father slumped over on the desk.
*
Lanzano’s Butcher Shop was my first job. I lasted a month. Tony, the old man behind the counter who used to give me a slice of salami every time Mother and I went shopping, effortlessly hacked up whole pigs in an instant, could slice by hand thinner and more precise than any machine. I stocked the shelves, mostly, but wanted to learn the craft. I was a lousy butcher. The little scars on my fingers still show in the right light. I wanted to be the best with knives. I still had the Army knife, but had never told Mother.
*
I committed my first crime with the knife —after Luigi Canaveri, the older kid from the building next door, paid me two hundred forty-four dollars and seventy-two cents out of his pocket —prying open the mailbox for Apartment 2A to steal and bring to Canaveri the large, orange envelope. I didn’t think of it as a crime —that was the way things went in our neighborhood, Canaveri had an influential family, and I was glad to have the money. This wouldn’t make me a monster.
*
I walked Luisa home from the club, still giddy from the music and the fact that she’d agreed to see me, when an older man emerged from the shadows and started yelling at us in Italian. I had seen him before outside of the bar across town. Stepping in front of Luisa, I brandished the knife, cursing at the man, until he reluctantly left. Luisa squealed and threw her arms around me. I had never been happier. I kissed her at the doorstep, and she smiled and ran up the stairs.
*
I married Luisa on the seventh of November, in the church. No one objected; it was a perfect marriage, everyone knew. She didn’t look great in white, and I never looked great in a suit, but it was perfect. She grinned the entire day, and her grandmother, forgetting my name, kissed us both on the cheek. Her grandfather smelled of cologne and cigarettes. Mother, in a green wool dress, held me closely before Luisa and I hopped in the car and left.
On the road out of the city, another car ran into ours. Luisa screamed. We had to be at the hotel by six. I slammed the door on the way out of the car and told the man this, and told him that I had a wife, still in her wedding dress, that he had made her cry. The man threw up his hands and said he hadn’t meant it. He wrote a check for the repairs and apologized, but I was young and excited and had just gotten married, and when he got back into his car and started to console the toddler in the backseat, I grabbed the knife and slashed his tires, and Luisa and I drove away.
*
As soon as Luisa left, in a huff, to sleep at her mother’s for the night, I pried the knife out from the wooden dinner table. It was stuck in there, and after a while, I decided to leave it and brew some tea before bed. My throat hurt from screaming.
*
I took the knife, sweat clinging to my forehead, separating my hair into vicious strands, and screamed, my throat ripping, and brought the blade down with such ferocity and abhorrence until it sunk into his flesh. Then I brought it up again, and back down into him, and again, until a splatter of his blood burned my eye, and I brushed it aside, and my face was wet with sweat and blood. I screamed again, and lifted his head, and slammed it into the floor, again, again. Luisa’s body still lay, half-dressed, face shocked, on his bed. I had only stabbed her once.
*
In the attic, I took the knife, newly cleaned, and carved her face out of the picture. She was smiling with crimson lips in her teal, two-piece swimsuit, her hair tucked into a modest swim cap of the same color, the bright pastel tones of the Italian coastline surrounding us.
*
Luigi Canaveri was my first visitor, before Mother even. He had gained weight in the past year; he looked like his father, small mustache and all. He held both of my hands across the table and laughed. He was always much more careful with his crimes, and had his father’s men to look after him when he wasn’t.
I never saw my knife again. I would think about it, though, sitting in an evidence locker, rusting, never to be used again, for good or evil. From the military to the suicide to the murder, it didn’t deserve what we had done to it.
Zooey Krezelak is a sophomore at Cheltenham High School in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. She enjoys writing on her own time, has previously submitted to other Philadelphia-based journals, and enjoys reading and writing. She has lived in Pennsylvania for three years.