Rounded With a Knife
by Christopher Giangiordano
part 1
Knife. The word clanged in his brain as if the weapon had been flung down before him onto the blacksmith’s bench. Silk bedsheets beneath him clung to his back. He opened his eyes. The apartment’s half-shuttered windows bled late-afternoon sun, and the room glowed a fierce bronze. I need a knife, he thought.
He heard distant shouts and splashes. Children playing in the resort’s pool. That was where they’d spent the earlier part of the day before the heat had forced them indoors. He’d swum and drunk anything the waiters would bring his way.
He turned his head heavily and, through gummed eyes, he watched her sleeping beside him. Her hands were folded at her breast, the line of her white neck arcing down from her chin like a—
Like a... like a... Like a ski slope. Oh dammit, I used to be able to write. A ski slope, for heaven’s sake.
Her pale gown spread over and around her. Her body was like something carved out of ice. She was as still and sculpted as an effigy.
I’m going to kill her right now. He stepped off his side of the bed as lightly as he could. The cool marble tiles sent a shock through the soles of his feet. He felt it would be nice to lie there, on the floor, in his nakedness, but he’d feel too much like something on a butcher’s slab. He winced as he felt the pressure of his naked bulk on his bad knee. That’s not gotten any better, since her. Everything, everything, was more or less her fault.
Sweat tickled him all over. It wasn’t fair. She looked placid enough there, like Lenin lying in state. Alright, he was hairy and fat and hungover but still. It was as if she’d beamed down that instant from some arctic heaven. He remembered how graceful he’d felt at first in the water. She’d lain poolside on a lounger, gazing down her body at him as he made short work of some lengths with his muscular, choppy strokes.
At one horrible moment he’d surfaced right before her. The water streaming from his balding head, he’d seen her red half-smile floating in the distance like a shy bougainvillea and those long, white legs stretching out either side of him, guiding his gaze inwards towards her groin. Oh hell, he’d thought then, I feel like I’ve just been shat out of her womb.
He shuddered and closed the kitchenette drawer. What sort of apartment contains no cutlery? The whole thing was a sham. Some model of living. An apartment with a kitchen but no means to cook. Look at these identical bottles of mineral water; he heard them chime on the shelf as he stomped around the kitchen. The staff replaced them wholesale, untouched, every day. Even the early evening sun was dying in discrete intervals, painting the room in exact shades, beat after beat.
The rotisserie spit in the pristine oven? Don’t fancy dismantling that thing. There’s not a damn thing in this fancy-dan apartment to wield against her. He glanced at the woman. He fancied she stirred under his gaze; some indefinable movement at her midriff.
He went over to the bureau. Squat, heavy, almost black in the creeping dusk. This was where she kept his pages. When he had the apartment to himself, he’d write and write: nonsense, childish babble; half-remembered homilies from the glossies; pleadings to his inner self to pull itself together, to NOT drink NOT drink or so be it, if to drink, then to make it worthwhile to his muse, which remained steadfastly mute.
When she’d return from her excursion, having carefully folded her parasol by the door and as he glared at the ceiling from the bed he’d flung himself onto, she would wordlessly gather up the scattered pages and tidy them into this bottom drawer. He knelt and touched the oak panelling. He’d as soon touch this as the back of his skull; both contained the same chaos.
But the bureau also contained the knife. Of course, why hadn’t he thought of it before? He eased open the drawer. The knife was no more than a particularly sharp letter-opener, but he’d found it lying somewhere nearby, he forgot where, and tucked it into this red folder they’d found in the apartment back at the beginning of their stay. It contained Useful Local Information. There it was, in the plastic wallet that also held pamphlets for local businesses. One read: Cantina Pinche Pinche.
Pinche Pinche me, I’m dreaming. Its short hilt was strapped with delicate leather binding. Short but slender and wrought to an evaporatingly sharp point. He imagined a Cavalier mouse wielding it in a cartoon. In the plastic wallet, it looked like something in a police evidence bag. He extracted it carefully. Flat on his unsteady hand and at a certain angle it caught the last of the day’s light. A little shaft of orange-red, trembling on his palm. When he turned it edge-on, it was so thin as to be nearly invisible...
Knock Knock. “Housekeeping, Madamee,” came a soft voice from beyond the door.
He jolted to standing, and his knee screamed. Oh, God, the pain. How long had he been crouched there, staring at this thing? The apartment was gloomy, and only the lights of the resort outside allowed him to navigate the bedframe. Moaning softly, he limped past her, where she lay miraculously unconscious, while soft taps like the first drops of rain pattered at the apartment door.
“I could not do it earlier. It is Housekeeping.”
He saw the folds of her gown twisting as she stirred. He staggered toward the door, the knife in the twilight a pale brand in his outstretched hand. The door handle twitched, and he floundered at it, whispering, “Shut up, shut up. Madame is asleep.”
Not much higher than the handle, the maid peeped her head into the room. Large brown eyes looked at him queryingly, timidly, and he took a breath to speak but then, horrors: below, a chubby brown naked leg appeared. She wanted ingress and was behaving like a travelling salesman. Indignantly, the knife leapt. It was like a paintbrush stroke, a lazy daub with his arm, and the knife stroked the maid’s leg from just below the cut-off of her denim shorts to her knee. The point was so sharp he felt no resistance.
She inhaled sharply, perhaps perceiving no more than a quick little stinging rebuke from the knife. But, a second later, a long, thin thread of blood appeared down the length of her thigh, like an artery suddenly translated to the other side of her skin. The maid looked down and took a deep breath and—
“Sorry, maybe later,” he said and smartly closed the door on her scream. He heard her flipflops slapping into the distance in the hallway. Snapping his attention back to the bed, he marvelled: What’s it going to take to wake her? A goddamn mariachi band?
But he wouldn’t have long now. Soon there’d be a clutch of burly employees battering the door down. They’d overwhelm him, unless he had...
A machine gun, boomed a voice from the wall above the sleeping woman. It had been there all along of course. Of course, he thought, and grinned at his own forgetfulness. Some damn old rusty relic from a forgotten local war. It hung suspended by its cracked green leather strap from a couple of thick nails. The gun.
I still function, it intoned, and I’m packed with bullets.
He was reaching for it when the knife in his hand piped up. Such extravagant lengths to achieve your aim, it purred. He looked down at its bloody tip. Quickly, come with me now and extend your arm into the woman. Together we’ll watch the crimson bloom.
I suppose I had my time, said the gun. The man nearly came to attention, such was the poignancy in that rusting, martial voice.
Be quick, insisted the knife. He clambered onto the woman, his hands either side of her head. He leant his face down to her ear, feeling her stray hairs tickle his forehead. “You ruined my life,” he muttered and raised the knife.
She woke. Her eyes sprang open, and immediately he felt her hands gripping his neck. It happened so quickly he wasn’t even sure it wasn’t the other way around, that she’d shot her arms out to throttle him and then come to consciousness. He reared back in fear, and she cantilevered up from horizontal like a witch in a horror flick, her small, red mouth snarling as she pushed him back and down. He felt smooth, cool fingers slipping and finding new purchase on his bristly, sweaty neck. The knife skidded from his hand, hissing in annoyance away across the sheets.
I did not realise you were so infirm, it remarked as it clattered to the floor.
Close violence like that requires good form, agreed the machine gun.
“Shut up,” he gargled. Spots of electric yellow were fizzing at the edges of his vision, which was otherwise darkening as his throat rattled for air. He only saw a small, round, red mouth floating above him. Her lips were pursed in solemn concentration: the sense of some regrettable job being accomplished. He actually felt himself relax onto the bed. His knee no longer hurt, and he knew, as his life bled from him, that this was peace, of a sort.
Where did you go anyway, knife of mine, he thought dreamily.
I’m right here. The man suddenly felt the knife’s hilt in his right hand and he closed his fist instinctively around it. I never left you.
Copyright © 2025 by Christopher Giangiordano
