It was my forty-first birthday and I was angry. Out for blood. My husband Del had given me a knife and a pillow, gifts that proved he’d been paying attention.
The gifts were wrapped in shiny paper and skillfully tied with matching silk ribbons. Wrapped by some sales associate, I imagined. Some young woman who worked at whichever home goods store he’d purchased them from. Williams Sonoma, maybe? Crate & Barrel?
We sat next to each other on the sofa. I stared at the cushions. I hated the way they stared back: blankly, without sympathy, square and oblivious. I hated that the stupid sofa cushions would go on existing long after me or Del, composed of some artificial, alien filling, unable to be broken down by nature, until they ended up in a landfill. I imagined the cushions next to a corpse, a long-lost torso, a severed hand reaching upward from a heap of soiled diapers and empty plastic laundry detergent jugs. I punched the cushion beneath me. After a few punches, when it no longer felt like enough just to punch the cushion, I punched the inside of my arm.
“Don’t do that,” Del said, softly pulling my fist away from my arm.
I shook my head in agreement and went soft and limp like the pillow in my hands. I was only half-joking when I hit myself in front of him.
“I want to stab something,” I said, staring straight ahead. My eyes were glazed and wet and I had that funny feeling I got when I didn’t know if I was going to laugh or cry.
“Don’t stab me,” he pretended to protest, raising his palms to frame his face.
I laughed. “I won’t,” I said. “I love you.”
In my head, I heard the thought: don’t tell me what to do.
After my dad’s stroke, I needed a process, a way to exhume the negative energy and the rage buried within me. It was turning my body into stone. I was an island of rock, a destination impossible to reach without great effort.
Forty-one was too old to start cutting. It wouldn’t be mysterious and edgy for a woman my age to go all goth, start listening to Bauhaus, and slicing her skin in secret with a steak knife. Self-flagellation was off the table.
I preferred punching as an act of self-harm anyway. I liked to hear the smack of my fist against the skin of my thighs. I liked to see the colors of my bruises shift from purple to brown, green to yellow.
The gifts were high quality objects. The knife gleamed behind the plastic cover of its box, its blade silver and sharp, its handle heavy, the weight a comfort, something for me to hold on to, to grip in this new unfamiliar world of uncertainty. The pillow was plump, a luxury cotton form filled with downy feathers, its body shaped like love handles cut from cloth and soft as a woman’s skin.
After my dad’s stroke, one of the hardest things for me to accept was the initial loss—and eventually, the ultimate change—in communication. A bleed on the left side of his brain rejected all repair attempts. The stroke had affected his ability to read, speak, or process information, something called aphasia. I could no longer text my dad hello or call you later? and expect to receive a response. Now, he couldn’t read or reply without assistance. Now, to have a conversation we had to speak through others. I tried to stop making mental lists of all the things my dad could no longer do and think positively. What were things I could still cherish about him? I struggled to think of something. In my mind I saw only a black wall.
But I didn’t want to make this about myself. My estranged mother always found a way to make a situation—an occasion, holidays and birthdays—about herself.
I imagined the pillow could act as a stand in for my mother. I could tape a photograph of her to the front of the pillow and act out my rage, stabbing her with the knife over and over, like some kind of therapeutic exercise. Maybe through the physical act of slashing the pillow, I could manifest some kind of deal with the universe through the power of suggestion, like take her instead!
Del looked at me, staring down at the pillow, holding the rectangular stuffed shape between my hands, and as though he were able to read my racing thoughts he said: “I thought this might be like a therapeutic exercise? To help you process some stuff. ”
“Stuff indeed,” I said, poking at the pillow with my pointer finger, watching it rise and reinflate automatically like someone slowly breathing air into a pool float.
“Never mind. It was a stupid idea,” he said, shaking his head. “We can use them for the house.” He picked up the knife from the coffee table and reached for the pillow.
“I love them,” I replied, hugging the pillow close to my chest. And I meant it.
Del was the only one who understood me, who knew what I held inside because Del held things inside, too. We were two stones sitting next to each other on the sofa, trying to remain firm in this weird, tough world. Two lives learning to live with loss.
+
There was always bad traffic in Georgia, driving several hours down from South Carolina to Florida for frequent visits with my dad. The visits weren’t so bad if I ignored the Jesus pictures on the walls and shelves of every room. Besides the traffic and imposing religious decor, the time I spent with my dad was relaxing. He slept in his La-Z-Boy chair while I read or worked on a crossword puzzle. He only wanted someone to show up, to sit with him and stay quiet. We both wanted quiet; it was never quiet long enough. We longed to be unbothered. We were angry inside. We clenched our jaws and ground our teeth.
My dad shuffled up behind me in the kitchen. He had this very deliberate shuffle now; I could hear each foot as it slid across the floor. I was standing at the sink in his kitchen in Florida on another recent visit to his house, feeling resentful about using PTO and driving back and forth from SC to FL to see him. I felt I had a daughterly duty to check on him, like it was an unspoken expectation for me to pay him more visits, more frequently.
He was worried, I think, that he wouldn’t make it much longer, but he liked to act surprised, like it was a miracle he had lived as long as he had.
“A lot of people didn’t think I’d make it this far,” he’d sneer, waiting for a smile or a laugh.
“At least I’m on the right side of the dirt,” he’d joke, with his mouth dropping on the left side, a side effect of the most recent surgery.
There was kind of a twisted, dark humor to the way his face looked post-stroke, as if his true inner self could no longer be hidden. It was finally revealed to the world, represented by his freakishly angry facial expression.
He was worried, he said, that he would scare little children at church with his Halloween-mask appearance and so he wanted to leave the house less than ever. He sought solitude, but since he had newly impaired abilities he couldn’t be left alone.
I could only offer him so much comfort. I had a full-time job back home, and even though that job was remote and I could technically perform it from anywhere, I couldn’t afford to be his companion or nurse. He had a wife to take care of him. And Del was spending weekends alone without me, which I was also becoming resentful about. I had my own life. I was starting to feel my clock ticking, too.
“Where’d the dishes go?” he asked, putting his hands on the beige laminate counter.
“I loaded them into the dishwasher,” I said. I was prone to doing things without being asked, the way I wanted things to be done for me.
“You tryna take my job?” he snarled, the way he would when I was a teenager. He wasn’t really upset. The snarl was part of his whole tough guy act. The snarl was to get a laugh out of me.
But since washing dishes was one of the only skills he felt he had left to offer, I detected a sadness in him seeing that I had done the work. By performing the small act of kindness, I had stolen his chance to feel of worth, of service.
“Well, thank you sweetie,” he said, kissing the top of my head and patting one hand against mine as I dried my hands with a towel.
+
Outside the sun was warm and yellow, casting a hazy, dreamlike glow on the backyard. Birds whistled in the oak trees and bugs piloted invisible routes through blades of grass. The smell of a baked yellow cake from a box escaped through the kitchen window and an overpowering whiff of imitation vanilla tickled my nose. I walked barefoot to the middle of the yard, careful not to step on any ant mounds, and cast an old tapestry across the yard, spreading it on the grass like an old woman draping a sheet over a sofa.
Usually, I loved to lay in the grass and sunbathe, read a book. Occasionally I’d eat an edible in order to better connect with nature, observe often overlooked details. There were miniature lives coexisting, surrounding us at all times, each with their own complex colonies and underground chambers. I only had to remind myself to look for them.
But my energy had changed; I couldn’t concentrate on anything but my anger.
I placed the pillow in the middle of the tapestry. It was a soft substitute for the body of emotions tangled up in the center of my chest like a ball of rubber bands: the vessels snapping and bursting, bleeding into my dad’s brain. I got on my knees, pulled my yellow sundress down over them, and removed the butcher knife carefully from its package. The blade glinted in the sun, shooting yellow beams into my eyes. I should have worn protective goggles: this was an experiment in grief.
When I first brought the knife down, I felt self-conscious—what if someone was watching me? Was Del at the kitchen window? What would the neighbors think? But the second time I struck the pillow I felt a gate swing open, and I was unable to stop whatever was flowing out. I was no longer in control of my body. I was a strongman at the fair, striking my mallet down with brute force, sending the puck flying toward the top of the lever until the metal bell dinged. From the corner of my eye, I watched my right arm swing up and down repeatedly, stabbing the blade deep down into the dirt below. Brown and white feathers burst from the pillow and flew into the air around me and caught in my hair, little white flowers cascading from trees like confetti. I wondered, from what duck, what goose, had the feathers been plucked, stolen? Were the feathers torn from more than one bird’s body, ripped violently from the skin, and then combined to form one freakish pillow, the way hamburgers are made from multiple cows and mashed into one Frankenstein-like meat patty?
I observed the mess surrounding me. The knife, its silver blade caked with dirt. The pillow, deflated, its feathery guts strewn across the lawn. White and gray brown-tipped feathers, the color of brain matter.
When I looked up Del was standing there.
“The cake is cooling,” he said.
We walked back into the house. My feet tracked in the little feathers that were stuck to my soles. We stood in the kitchen. More feathers fell from my hair to the floor. I tried to pick them up, gripping them with my toes, but they kept floating back down, miniature skydivers slowly parachuting to the ground. I traced the tiles under our feet with my eyes, seeing all of the spots where the grout that held them in place was broken or missing. The tiles would need to be repaired, replaced and regrouted. We needed to stop them from fracturing further and falling out of place.
When the cake had cooled, I watched Del carefully apply thick yellow frosting with a plastic spatula. He used tubes of white and green icing to draw perfect daisies around the cake. It amazed me how he was able to perform acts so slowly and meticulously. He said this was because he wanted things to be done right, perfect. It made me wonder why he chose me; my dad always said I needed to learn to have more patience.
“Voila,” he said, presenting me with his culinary masterpiece.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
I held the knife against my sundress and smiled.
“I have just the thing to cut it,” I said.
+++
Kim Weldin (she/her) is a fiction writer from Charleston, SC. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BULL, Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, Apple in the Dark, The Ana, and Appalachian Review, Maudlin House, and others. She has received support from the Lillian E. Smith Center and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. When she’s not writing, she’s working by day as a contract paralegal, hanging out with her cats, or writing music.