Sharp

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Stab

When the doctors administered newborn-Celia her first set of vaccines, she screamed and screamed. I wept so hard I fell against a wall.

“She’ll never trust me fully, not ever again,” I sobbed to Steven-my-husband.

“It’s a couple of shots,” he said. “She’s tiny. She’ll forget.”

“No,” I said. “It’s betrayal, proof how this world stabs us wide open.”

“She has to learn it,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “But I hoped it’d be later than right at the beginning.”

Puncture

My cats love their dagger-teeth; I see it in every hiss and open-mouthed grin. They love their claws and carry them like stilettos up their sleeves. They’re made for the hunt, the kill. It doesn’t matter that I’ve fed them for years, kept them in the warm, stroked their fur while they preened. It’s nothing personal when I come away with puncture wounds and scratches in swirls and tic-tac-toes.

“Your cats hate you,” say my friends when they see the wreckage of my arms.

“No,” I say. “They love me.” But love has nothing to do with this.

Pierce

I happen to have a chronic disease, one that made itself known when I was a young teen. It’s permanent, though manageable enough. Never mind it feels like sand etching through my innards. As a result, I’ve had blood drawn again and again from the single, good vein in the crook of my right elbow—by nurses kind and dull, capable and not-so-much, and I sometimes end up bruised, purple and garish-yellow.

But I’m fine with needles. So what if I can’t watch while the point pierces my skin and eases beneath, while the plunger drops, the blood rising from the body through the needle’s long throat and into the little bottles? So what that I faint dead away?

Slice

Steven-the-chef adores his knives. When we first met, he introduced them to me—no names, thank God—one at a time. From him I learned the worth of a really sharp edge, the difference between dice and brunoise, batonnet and julienne.

Not that most of his lessons took.

“At least your instincts are good,” Steven says, when I jump back upon dropping the carving knife again. “And you’ve still got your toes! We’ll work on your grip next time.”

“Sure,” I say to Steven-the-optimist. But I admit it here: most knives contain me, I do not own them. In our family of blades I’m the spreader, the enabler, the holder. I ease things over, sooth the rough patches. And Steven loves me for it.

Bite

Just past her third birthday, toddler-Celia bites my leg, hard, right where foot and ankle meet.

“Why?” I ask, inspecting the broken skin, the drawn blood. “Why would you do this?”

Why this child? Tender to the heart, or so I thought. This girl who cleaves to me like static, so I can’t move, can’t turn around without bumping her, so I sometimes creep to the bathroom, lock myself in, just to inhabit my own silhouette for a minute. Even as Celia wails from the other side.

“Let me in. Let me in in in.”

“I’m taking a time-out,” I call through the door.

“No time-outs allowed,” she calls back.

On the night of the bite, Steven looks me over.

“Your leg is getting cluttered,” he says.

True. The half-moon wound glistens red beside the cat tattoo from my college years and the thumbnail-sized crater—memento from a date with Bobby-the-jock.

“It’s a scar-party,” I say. “Everyone’s invited.”

I smear ointment on the injury while Celia watches.

“What’s that?” she asks.

“It’s a bite,” I say. “Do you know yet why you bit me?” She shrugs her shoulders. She doesn’t want to discuss it.

“Doesn’t she love me?” I ask Steven.

“She loves you,” he says. “She loves you so much, she wants to eat you up.”

The mark lingers. For two weeks, Celia points to that place.

“What’s that?” she asks. “What’s that?” And she moves her finger—little worm, little noodle—across it, draws gentle circles around it. She’s a painter eyeing her masterpiece, a sculptor in love with her carving, a welder settled back on her heels, inspecting her impact.

“It’s a bite,” I say every time. “It will be a bite until it fades.”

She considers this, scratches her round chin. “After that, it will be the memory of a bite.”

“Is that good?”

“Yes,” she says. “Because I’ll be with you forever.”

Carve

If I could be any sharp instrument, I’d choose the scalpel. It cuts subtly: the deft flick of the surgeon’s wrist, a slice so thin the blood barely pools before the flesh is separated, the cancer snipped out/the beating heart mended/the snapped bone set into place.

But, no. The scalpel is sneaky and more than a little shrewd. It’s an instrument of quick wit, swift getaways, of promises but no guarantees. As such, it isn’t for me—a clumsy woman who writes her secrets to strangers, who likes to know the ending before committing to the book.

So, cheekbones, perhaps? Or collarbones like razorblades? The sort that carve lovers’ hands to red slivers. That grace runways in Paris and Milan, or the covers of fashion magazines. Worn as they are by models in sharp couture, these girls so skinny they tumble to the ground in a light wind.

No again. Because that’s my teenage dream, hardly substantial enough to keep a June bug alive.

Since I’m always starving these days, I’ll aspire to the ax. The smooth handle that fits your grip without leaving a splinter. The good weight at the head so you have to shift your stance, catch your balance on the shivering earth. There’s the heft of it in your arms, your shoulders tightening when you swing it overhead—you hold your breath. Then comes the exhalation, the great loosening when you let it go. Let me go. How I make a perfect arc, round like a woman’s hips, how I hiss through space towards first contact. The ax bites into the flesh of the tree—metal to wood, hailstorm of chips flying every which way so you have to duck. The smell of cherry or apple or ash rising all around like angel’s wings.

Kiss

This scar, from my first-ever date. When I went wheelin’ with Bobby in his Jeep, and he got me stupid drunk so I tumbled into the door, catching my leg on some sharp metal. I was 17 then, newly-slim as a knife-cut, for all I still moved through the world like a fat girl: tentative, eyes thick with kohl, dressed in black (of course), skulking in the deepest corners of the Detroit clubs I frequented on weekends, trusty fake ID in tow.

But Bobby, captain of the swim team, was tall and blond, compelling in that way of suburban boys in the ’80s. I leaned in his direction—I couldn’t stop myself. At my afterschool job at Gags & Games, which sold costumes and whoopee cushions and every incarnation of D&D ever.

Bobby said to me, “I want to, like, be a punk rocker for this party I’m going to.”

I said, “Like, get wasted and throw up.”

But when he asked me out, I said yes. And he taught me to kiss once and for all, good and proper. He kissed me wide awake, and I sliced my leg, though I didn’t notice it until the next morning when the blanket stuck to my scabbed-up shin. And when I tore it off, I ripped the wound open, and blood ran rivers across my white sheets.

Dig

Over weeks, my first-date injury flamed at its edges and sent purple veins of infection toward my heart. When the doctor finally saw it he dosed me with massive antibiotics and wrenched apart the new scab to rinse it with I-don’t-know-what, but it burned like fire, so stars exploded behind my eyes.

“It’ll leave a scar,” the doctor said, and went on digging, layer by layer.

I gritted my teeth and said nothing. But if I could flip a switch and return to that moment, I’d tell him what I’ve learned since: that scars do us a favor, tying together what’s been broken. How, over time, the jagged edges go smooth. How they prove we’ve survived.

Break

Celia shouts at me.

“You abandoned me on the counter. I could have fallen. I could have broken myself.”

“I plopped you on the counter for a moment. I stayed so close you couldn’t fall.

“You left me with a knife. I wasn’t safe. I could’ve sliced myself open.”

“It was a butter knife—it’s got nearly no edge. You would’ve had to hit yourself with it over and over to break the skin.”

“I could’ve. I could’ve picked it up and cut myself if I tried really hard.”

“You’re five years old now. Just don’t pick up the knife. Don’t slice yourself with it.”

She glares at me reproachfully. I have failed another test.

Poke

Before this, at the very start of Steven and me, we gave blood for HIV tests—because it was the responsible thing, because of turning thirty the previous birthday and having a life before that. Because we already knew we were the real deal, soul mates snipped at the core, at the beginning of time, and come back together at last.

At the inner-city clinic we chose because it was free, the oh-so-young nurse brings me to a room. I explain about my chronic illness, but I don’t think he’s listening. He takes my temperature—“Normal,” he says. Checks my pulse—“Quick.”

He picks up my arm and observes the one, good vein in the crook of my right elbow—recipient of poke after poke, month after month after year, the tiny scars, smaller than freckles, left behind.

“Were you an addict?” he asks.

“Sure,” I tell him. Because why not?

“I’m a love junky,” I say in my best Barry White voice, and I pat his round, baby cheek.

Chop

The apple tree in our yard was a warped thing. It grew aslant, hunched and crooked as an old, old man. It shaded the ground, and grass never grew beneath it. One great branch jutted far to the side—perfect for a small girl, then a growing girl. Just right for swinging, for sitting upon and remembering the day. On alternate years it overflowed with apples, sweet apples by the bushel-full. But so what? We never sprayed and the fruit grew wormy. The squirrels grew fat and jaded with the bounty, perched in the top branches grabbing apple after apple, taking a bite or two and tossing the rest at Donna-the-dog as she ran in frenzied circles beneath them. The whole and half-bit apples dropped—too many of them—to the bare ground, and though we raked daily, we couldn’t keep up. The extravagance drew wasps and bees and hoards of biting ladybugs. Until Steven was done.

“I’m gonna chop it,” he said.

But, “No,” cried Celia. “It’s my tree, and I love it.” So he waited.

And later, as a teenager, Celia said, “No. That tree is my childhood,” so Steven waited some more. Until he was stung again, until Donna puked apple vomit and moaned in a corner. Until I slid on rotten fruit, hurting my back.

So when college-bound Celia left with friends, Steven pulled out his chainsaw and that was that, the tree came down in an hour. I admit I wept a little, but still I helped with the aftermath, wielding clippers like a champ, trimming branches into smaller branches, tying the bundles with twine and lugging them to the curb.

Flay

And Celia never noticed. The next sunny afternoon, she dragged a lounge chair to the place that once contained an apple tree. In her spot atop the stump-scar, she applied sunblock to every inch of her skin as I’ve taught her, and settled down with phone in hand to review that hour’s hoard of texts. Two weeks later we dropped her at college. She was shining from the inside out, flushed like a ripe apple, giddy with possibility. She grinned at us, waved once, then once more, and turned her back—just like that. Like all children, everywhere, are meant to do.

Nowadays, Steven and I wander around our empty house. Because it’s winter, we look out the window to the snowy space where Celia’s tree once stood.

“I refuse to regret it,” says Steven.

Still, children are fickle. You teach them to step blithely into their futures, and without even noticing, they flay the heart from your body to keep as a souvenir.

And you look at that scar daily, press it lightly with your fingertips. Say Thank you. Thank you my darling.

Laura Bernstein-Machlay teaches literature and creative writing at The College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI. Her work has appeared in many journals. She has an essay forthcoming from Hotel Amerika, and her full-length collection of creative nonfiction essays, Travelers, was recently named a finalist in Foreword Review’s INDIE book award. She has also been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes in both the essay and poetry categories.
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