Butter Knife

You were buttering your toast when it started. That slow, almost gentle hum. It ran its fingers down your spine and eclipsed the morning sunlight. It made you look up from the butter knife in your hand.

It crawled up your throat, bristled legs catching against your skin, hooking onto the soft flesh of your lip. It crept into your ear canal—tiny, fibrous wings quivering—and now that's where it stays.

Sometimes, when the sky is an ink stain and the whole world has become a liminal space, you stir from the down of your bed and light a candle.

You use a lighter, or a match—every time it's different. Sometimes if you stare at the wick long enough, a little tongue pokes out and dances for you. Always you use the same candle. It's a lot shorter than it was a few months ago, but you feel the same, so it doesn't bother you. Not even the wax does, as it drips down your wrist, running through your fingers. It's scalding but you don't feel it.

More so, you feel the house as it rests around you. Each creek, each settling, each little whimper in the floorboards. It floods your senses like a book, like an ocean. Lungs full of dust and lichen. Eyes prickling with the dark, the flickering halo of the candle in your hand. And the silence buzzes around you endlessly like the flies. It is so thick you feel as if you can't move without being suffocated. Yet you do.

You shuffle through the hallways and the rooms, and in each one you linger, but never long enough to see the geckos hesitantly slipper back out from their hiding spots.

You know there's something there, following you like the shadows that hop and dance around you. You can feel it on your skin, like the feral mould of heat clinging to your pores and scratching out your insides.

You always knew it was there, just like how you can sense someone's unease. How you can reach out your hand, even though you're afraid too, and let your fingers close around it—wax crumbling and falling away.

It scampers off as soon as you do. It's afraid, but not of you. It's afraid of everything else.

The weight of the silence.

The muffled bumps in the walls.

The sloping fields outside, where dew turns the grass to silver in the creaking dam of dawn.

You would feel sorry for it if you weren't so afraid yourself. Not that you'd admit it. That would be like settling down on your knees in front of it. Like watching with open eyes as its whittled hands lent out, the corpse of a cat in its palms.

It would be like carefully taking that cat into your own hands—fur coming loose and fluttering to the dirt—until you were crouching in the dark with the cat. It would be like looking down at it in your lap even while you know it has no eyes to look back at you. And you couldn't do that.

Maybe you could bury it, but you have a feeling it would get dug back up again. Night after night, day after day. Then you would have to watch it decay. The worms looping holes through its bones. Hair fallen off and skin like grey pulp. You would have to let the flies skim about, the maggots wriggle through your fingers and your teeth. And oh, you just can't do that. Not again. Not after seeing it once—all that blood in the grit of the tiles—it would be too much. Like swallowing sap and feeling it harden in your throat. The rigid shell of a beetle scraping tender, picky flesh. No.

No.

In the morning, you go outside. Somehow, the grass between your toes and the air full of dirt and rain helps you breathe a bit.

You try to settle where you stand, but it's as if you're balancing on a mossy rock and you just can't catch your footing.

The sun is a solar flare low in the sky, but the clouds are long and delicate—strung cotton wool. The air feels like thin sheets, whispering over you as you move down to the valley. It's where you buried the cat, all those weeks ago. It feels simultaneously too long and too short a time. Like the candle you lit, it's waning and boiling and it makes your skin itch. But you don't mind.

You butter your toast now without a second glance at the knife.

Sure, sometimes you feel it lunge into your chest. Rip back out again. Force back in. Again and again and again like you were the one who had lain on the floor, a grey center piece in a blooming rose. But that doesn't stop you anymore.

When you let the butter knife slip into the sink—a metallic clatter—it isn't full of bloody water.

When you look out the window, it isn't a fracturing night of cold silver and alternating red and blue. It's the fields, flecks of diamond between the blades. The sun warm on your face. Crumbs on your hands instead of wax. A mouthful of butter and the nutty, baked bread. Wet dough on your tongue.

You watch the distant trees waver in the breeze, like hundreds of emerald flames.

The quiet sinks into you like syrup.

And, miraculously, you breathe.