Short Folk #5: His Next Life was as a Knife

 Note: Travel day today. Salt Lake to Mexico City. Busy weekend ahead with no sure internet connection. I'll do my best.  I might have to recycle some slightly older drafts to fill up the travel days. Here is something I wrote about a month ago. The genesis is seeing an incredibly thin gaunt old guy on the subway and instantly thinking that he would be reincarnated as a knife. I tried that concept around with some things and it didn't fit until I added this female narrator and this family setting.  Sentimentality is the beast I try to avoid, and I'm not so sure about this one, but oh well.  Also, I love this Picture----->

 His Next Life was as a Knife

 There was a man who was so sharp with me. Hard with me. I finally left him, sure that his next life would be as a knife. 
 

            Seven years later I’m in the kitchen cutting apples for my daughter. With my sharpest knife, cutting apples on the white countertop—it’s blue tile backsplash.  Just one of those regular perfect days—in the clean blue kitchen cutting apples for my three year old daughter.

             

Two types of apples are in front of me. One’s Gala. And it’s clear to me that the sharpest knife in my hand prefers Gala apples. It wants to taste them, it has a will to cut them, so I obey, slicing halfway, letting the blade linger a bit in the apple’s flesh. I think about it for a long moment. Then I say over my shoulder,

             

“John, do you remember where we got this knife?”

             

He comes into the kitchen. He leans over my shoulder. His hand is on the small of my back. He looks at the knife.

             

“That’s the one my mom brought back from Japan.”

           

He sneaks a slice of the apple and then he leaves the kitchen—leaves me with the knife in my hand and the power to do anything with it. Anything at all.  I slide it back into the apples’ flesh, for old times’ sake. Then I speak to it. I say,

           

“Tyson how’d you die? And how did you make it all the way to Japan?”

           

John hears me. “Rachel?” he asks from the other room.