My first crush was on the knife. It made the fork look like an artless rake; the spoon was just plain pathetic.
Now you may think I was perhaps projecting my daughterly love for my father onto the knife, but my father was a fat ugly bastard, and I knew that as soon as I was old enough to set the table.
Sometimes I wonder if I fell in love with the knife at such a young age because I wanted to kill my father with it. No. The answer is know, I mean NO.
Also that wouldn’t explain my next crush: on the number seven, 7. We seemed to really meet, that number and me, truly lock eyes and souls, when I turned 7. I remember saying to myself, to him: Never forget this moment; now we are seven. Our love proved ageless: it remains a living, mystical union.
My father never knew anything about my relationships with knives and numbers. We didn’t talk much, he and I. As I understood it, it simply wasn’t part of the arrangement between fathers and their daughters. Words were not exchanged: blows of various kinds, yes; words, no.
By the time I had reached puberty—or as close to it as I ever came—I’d ride behind my father in the car, staring at the back of his square bald head, imagining plunging a much larger, sturdier, dagger-like knife into his skull or neck. I had no idea why this fantasy soothed and calmed me so deeply, enabling me to remain in that small, high-velocity metal rectangle we were trapped in together without vomiting.
But I wasn’t the one wanting to vomit in the car—that was my sister. What makes her so sick all the time, I wondered? It was such a foul, putrid smell of illness emanating from her mouth and nose. It didn’t matter, I adored her anyway, completely—until one day I didn’t; many painful periods in our childhood were to come between us throughout our lives, when our imprisoned selves wished each other dead. But by the time she died, I adored her completely and totally.
She died very early of breast cancer, never to ripen to a full middle age, doomed by an illness that seemed surely to have grown out of the years and years of endometriosis, which she ignored and denied, allowing it to lacerate her from the inside out: A crazy blade trapped inside her that wasn’t satisfied until every trace of the cursed remnants within her were excised. When she died, I could feel with my own hands an electric current rushing out of the top of her head like a woosh of doves.
© AM HOCH 2017
