clarity and a ka-bar

Things did not become clear to her until she fell on a knife which pierced the base of her skull. The knife, a ka-bar Marine Corps Fighting Knife, to be precise, was lying in a pile of her stuff on the floor and she tripped and feel into the stuff and the knife pierced her flesh and bone. As her own blood soaked her hair and the pile of towels she had made to put away, a pile of laundry and shoes, as well as the typical sundry things she has told her son belong in his room and his alone – his jock strap for instance, his athletic cup – she thought she finally knew the nature of life and that is to always be striving and yet falling behind.

She had dumped him too late, the marine who wasn’t divorced yet, only separated, who brought over the ka-bar, a knife that cut a tree in half he said and though he possessed weapons to kill he had not filed and yet he wanted everything and yet there she bled, rejecting him, finally, in her mind, breaking up with him. She had the last word, she told herself, she did, not him.

We are born falling behind, she thought. Even when we come into our powers young, we lose them again as children grow, spouses leave, our own powers and will fade through illness and age, and it is almost appropriate that we be knifed and be left to lie like animals after a fresh kill.

Why he left the knife for her, she does not know. He kept it in a sheath on his hip but he was showing it off and they must have made love and he must have left it there, distracted, bothered by the failure of his own marriage, desperate not to be alone, and she, liking the attention and not even caring she was a fill in girl, going along for the moment, this lonely shared moment when others were succeeding. This shared failure that kept her up at night, thinking, about it and how it was nice and yet not nice at the same time. She was finally pierced by his rejection though he would have said, and his conscious did believe, that he loved her. He did not. She was a pin cushion, a living doll whom he dressed with his comments. He left the knife there on purpose though his conscious mind would have rejected the idea.

It became clear, how some are losers, like herself, have always been, it’s just the occasional scrim of seeming success allows her to fool herself. But she didn’t care, she was returning to earth, finally, the will to live gone with the blood. She would call the ambulance dispatch, yes, her phone was nearby but they would arrive too late and only she could be in charge of her death and so she broke up, finally, with the broken man, and begged for forgiveness of her son by falling on the knife, finally, and leaving him, this boy, the wing of her heart, this dove of a man.

She fell asleep in her blood, that is what it felt like, those moments of half conscious dreaming. A bear chased her. He ripped through her. She told her child to run. “Run!” was all she heard someone say to the empty house and she recognized the voice as her own. And she slipped into the darkness but had no sensations of fear, only release.