---

---

 

The first time was an accident. She was slicing carrots, trying to keep them thin and angled, assaulted on her left by the blaring television in the living room, and on the right by her children squabbling in the dining room, and she slipped. The knife was a good one, heavy and thick bladed, and she kept it sharp, running its edge against the steel at a twenty-degree angle like her father had taught her, ten strokes on one side, ten on the other, counting each snick of the blade. Her college roommate had taught her that you cut yourself less with a sharp knife than a dull one. An old boyfriend had taught her that a sharp knife makes for fewer tears when cutting onions. But they had perhaps neglected to teach her that a sharp knife cuts clean and deep, so smoothly you don’t even feel it. 

She looked down, her attention captured by some change on the cutting board below, and wondered at the spreading red flooding the orange field of carrots, one coin lighter than the rest. Her pinky. Not the whole pinky, but the soft pad of the fingertip. She was surprised into stillness, then blotted the cutting board and turned to run her finger under water, red leaching against stainless steel, then wrapped it in the dishcloth, red blooming against soft blue fabric and staining it purple, and when she turned back to her work, her mother had swept the carrots into the pot, including the bit of her finger, and was dicing potatoes in their place.

Her heart stuttered. “Mom—” she said. 

Her mother turned, grimace already in place.

“What?” her mother said. “What did I do now?”

“Nothing,” she said. She turned to the stove and stirred, pensive.

At dinner, she watched her three children, her husband, and her mother spoon stew into their mouths. She startled at each exclamation, sure that someone would find and, worse, recognize the small piece of herself. But talk was of school, work, bridge, church. And of the stew.

“This is delicious,” her husband said, scraping a piece of bread into his bowl to catch the last remaining taste. “You’ve outdone yourself tonight.”

“I can tell how much work you put into this,” her mother said, nodding.

“Well,” she protested. “You helped, you know.”

Her mother smiled, gently. “This one is all you, my girl.”

Her oldest son hugged her at the end of the meal. Her middle son cleared the plates without being asked. Her youngest requested she read to him for bedtime, even though it was her husband’s turn.

She smiled, hugged, passed her bowl and silverware, and tried not to pick at the bandage on her finger, the throbbing wound beneath.

The next week, after her middle child had spent a sullen afternoon slamming doors and denying anything was wrong, she shooed her mother out of the kitchen and drew the blade of the heavy knife down the outer rim of her ear when no one was looking. Just a little sliver of flesh, quickly lost in the stir-fry. She had a bandage at the ready that time, pushed her hair forward to cover her ear.

At dinner, the floodgates opened: the fight with the best friend, the snubs in the school hallway, the frustration, the shame. Her sweet, self-conscious boy even cried, tears salting his untouched food, but his older brother didn’t laugh or kick his chair, and his younger brother watched it all with large, awed eyes. Her mother reached out and patted her son’s hand, her husband sighed down into his plate. They all listened, really listened. She couldn’t remember the last time her house had been so silent with so many people in it at once.

When she went back to the kitchen to dish ice cream into bowls for them all, she picked up the knife from its resting place on the cutting board and licked the blade, felt it bite into the softness of her tongue, and then stirred the knife into the strawberry sauce before she ladled it onto the sundaes.

“Dessert after you finish dinner, my love,” she said, prodding her middle son to eat at last, and then settled back into her seat to hear everyone else fall over themselves between cold bites to share their own moments of shame, of disappointment, of anger with friends, family, each other. Who among them hadn’t said the wrong thing, not said enough, said what should have been thought only? They talked and talked, far past even the oldest son’s bedtime, and laughed, and cried, and ended by doing the dishes all together, all six of them, wiping and stacking and leaning against each other like newlyweds, like people who had survived a plague.

It was hard to stop, after that. Her mother was banished from the kitchen, happy to watch television with the kids. Gauze and plasters proliferated in the cabinet under the kitchen sink. She sharpened her knife at seventeen degrees, then fifteen, sharp enough to whisper through paper. More of her fingertips, her earlobes, thin shavings of the plumpest swell of her lips. A plug of her left breast, then her right. A tendril of muscle from her bicep. Her eyelid, and when that didn’t seem to provoke the insight she was hoping for, the whole eye. Worth it, she shrugged, pressing down on it with the back of a wooden spoon until it had simmered away to almost nothing. She cut deeper, into the thin skin above her breastbone, into the bone itself. She limped, she swayed, sometimes agonized, sometimes numb. She was more scab and bandage than herself, but her family had never been so engaged, so cared for. So loving, and so loved. She leaned over the bubbling pot to let the blood of her heart drip down.

“It’s so good, Mom,” they said, lifting their spoons to their lips. “It’s so, so good.”

 

---

ANDREA CAVEDO has taught high school history and government in and around Chicago for the last decade. Her writing has appeared in Orca and HerStry. She is at work on a novel. Find her on Instagram and Threads @mrscavedowrites.

 

Featured image by Conscious Design, courtesy of Unsplash.