How I held the knife— By Kyle Cochrun

Heavenly by Joseph Verrastro

It was an eight-inch chef’s knife, Cuisinart brand, lavender-colored, stainless-steel, used to hack apart Red Baron pizzas. The night before I left it balanced atop the stack of dishes in my sink.

I woke up to the woman shouting for help. I looked out my window and saw the man and the woman struggling in the corner of the alleyway near the chain-link fence, where overnight they’d pitched a tent. I grabbed the knife. The blade was still streaked in marinara sauce. The gently curved contour of its handle pressed into the skin of my palm.

I walked out to the alleyway. The pavement was coated in piss and cigarettes. Trash bags were scattered about. The woman continued to scream. I couldn’t see her face. The man on top of her turned sideways, glancing me over. His eyes stopped at the knife.

I did not hold the knife to kill. I did not point the knife at the man pinning down the woman screaming five feet before me. I did not swing the knife back and forth like a pirate or stab at the air like a fencer or twirl it around in my fingers like some leather-jacketed delinquent in a biker flick. I held the knife without flourish. I held the knife discreetly. I held it like a baseball or a half-eaten sandwich or some other object that can be disregarded for a few moments while you stop to confront a stranger. I held it firmly, so that it wouldn’t waver, so that my unforeseen movements might seem more dangerous.

Could I bring myself to cut him?

I spoke to the man in the same rigid manner with which I held the knife. “Get off of her,” I said. He said, “She started it.” She’d jumped on him first. The man spoke with the tone of a pleading child.

The woman continued to yell at the man to get off of her. From underneath his body poked the whites of her bare heels, wriggling, wide and smeared with wet brown grime.

I wanted to hold the knife in a way that was quietly menacing but also suggested that, although I did not understand what it was like to camp in an alleyway downtown, I understood how the circumstances that might cause two people to camp together in an alleyway downtown would lead to some serious emotional friction, that any reason to wrestle someone you care for down to the pavement at least deserves to be viewed through the lens of a fucked-up situation. I was willing to stab this man, but I owed him this.

Because every day I saw something disheartening, a scene deserving of the initiative I suspected had gone dormant inside me. Fist fights on the D-Line, open wounds spilled on the asphalt, people with their eyes rolled back in their heads, slobbering gibberish as they lurched through the street, their outstretched hands swollen to the reddish purple of a rotting plum. And even now – as the man shifted his weight back on his heels, carefully lifting his body off the woman’s, his eyes fixed on the knife – I recognized the voice of the woman crumpled beneath him; it was the voice that, for the past week, I had heard through my open window, sobbing late into the night.

The woman began to pick herself off the pavement.

The man stood up straight and walked towards me.

I wanted to hold the knife in a way that showed I was not to be fucked with. I wanted to hold the knife in a way that made him feel comfortable passing close enough beside me so that he could walk past me and down the length of the alleyway and out into the morning air, far from the woman. I wanted to hold the knife in a way that suggested I could never understand what he was going through, and that by refusing to betray any hint of rage through movement I was acquitting him of his actions, calling it even if he just walked away, because I wanted everyone to be safe, because there’s no use harboring hatred towards a man who sleeps in an alleyway downtown. I wanted to project the threat of violence and a forgiveness born of empathy.

But you can’t hold a knife like that.

Kyle Cochrun is a writer from Akron, Ohio.