Knife

♦ Thomas Beard ♦

Maybe he’ll use me for cooking this time.

Maybe I’ll chop carrots, or broccoli. Maybe the meat he plunges me into will be cow, or lamb.

Not human. Please not another human life.

It started years ago. He took me out of the kitchen. I heard screaming, someone trying to run.

And then I felt it. 

First he beat me against the bone. Maybe an arm, maybe a throat. Beat me until I was chipped and tired. And then he stabbed.

He sent me screaming through skin and vein, heartlessly cutting. If I could scream, I would have screamed I can’t scream I wanted to scream get me out. 

And he did. He threw me on the ground and he left. I couldn’t scream.

For two days, I sat there. Then he picked me up, and he killed someone else. 

All people are the same, to me. You have your own personality and dreams, sure. But I have yet to kill a human that doesn’t make the same screams. Or the same crunch. 

You all die the same. I can assure you that.

So years ago. For years plunged, cut and stabbed, forcing open wounds. For years I’ve bathed in your blood, and your sweat, and your screams. I reckon by now I know more about human biology than the smartest of your doctors. To have ended a hundred lives, if only I could start one.

I wonder why he’s kept me, all these years. I know humans throw away most of their things after a while. Perhaps it’s a knowing act of cruelty. Perhaps he simply doesn’t care. I can’t decide which one is worse. 

And now it’s you.

You live in a fairly average place. You have a job. Maybe you work at an office, maybe you work from home, or at a store. You could have a spouse, or you could have children, or neither or both. I’m sure he knows. He's been watching you closely. You might have seen him. The stranger on the subway, the man behind you at night. He’s watching you, and now he knows how to get you. 

He left something, a message, wherever you live. Wherever only you could see it, and no one else. 

You should run. 

And you did. You took your stuff - a mistake, a waste of precious time - and then you got in your car. You skipped town, rushing down the highway at a near suicidal pace - mistake number two. So your car broke down. It really wasn’t built for such speed, so it broke down in the woods. 

Seeing you alone, trapped, helpless. Nowhere to run, no one to scream to. It was sad, really.

Pathetic. 

You heard something, rustling, maybe footsteps. That sets you off. You went screaming through the trees, so fast I thought you might have tripped, or broke something. So fast, I think you were falling. Falling, falling down, into the night. 

He chased you for hours. It was daytime when you ran, maybe noon. By now it was early morning the next day, the sun just about to rise. I don’t know how you could run for so long. 

But he did find you, in the end.

He cornered you, tired and scared, scared out of your right mind. You screamed, you howled and sobbed when he found you. All of that tension, built up to your breaking point, let out in one primal shriek, a noise that could wake the dead, the legions of the damned you would soon be joining. The harbinger of your end. 

He went for the arms first, slitting the flesh on your joints. Nowhere fatal, no, he wanted to make this last. 

Then your gut, a couple plunges and then he sliced upwards to your chest, slicing in strange ways, the ways he always does.

And I don’t want to say what comes next. It’s a lot, really. I hate it. 

But it’s gruesome, know that. Gruesome and painful and so unnecessary. But it happened. And it hurts. 

And they find your body only a day later, when a nearby hiker calls the police. They find a mark, a strange mark, on your corpse. They find a newspaper article, something about a killing or a stalker or something. And a signature, carved into your carrion. His calling card. They’ll find more like you, in time.

But you don’t know that yet. Now you’re running, maybe running to your job because you woke up late again and maybe no one’s noticed yet, or maybe running to meet someone or something else. But it doesn’t matter. You’ll be gone soon, just another victim.

But what do I know? I am simply the weapon, the tool. Maybe you’ll live. Maybe you won’t.

Maybe he’ll use me for cooking this time.