He never liked the Ginsu Knife.
It kept looking at him.
Actually, it was his own reflected image in the knife that would stare back at him as he crept warily by, but the knife had a strange way of twisting and distorting the reflection until it bore little resemblance to the man who had cast it.
Cautiously he would sneak past the knife, daring not to look at it directly but nonetheless sensing from the corner of his eye the grim and menacing face following his movements.
"I'm gonna throw that Goddam knife out!" he would repeatedly threaten to his wife. But she would hear none of it.
"That knife belonged to my Great Grandmother!" she would scream frantically. "YOU go before the knife goes!" And that would settle it.
But don't think he hadn't thought about it. He loved his wife, but there were times when he teetered on the absolute brink of leaving her if only just to get away from that cursed knife. Her Great Grandmother's knife! He remembered her Great Grandmother, the decrepit senile old bat. She was a witch. Or so she used to tell him anyway every time they would visit her in the nursing home where she eventually died.
One day as he walked past the knife he swore he saw from the corner of his eye the old lady's demented and twisted face laughing at him. He was driven to desperation. He was prepared to woo.
"Darling," he said to his wife one memorable evening in post-coital embrace, "I love you more than life itself. But I really don't liked that knife very much. Why can't we just keep it in the drawer with the other knives? Why must it hang there on the wall?"
As she was momentarily and blissfully satiated and therefore off her guard, she replied openly and honestly.
"Harry," she said, "do you remember when I was alone with my Grandma, just before she died?"
"Yes," he replied, momentarily taken aback with the sudden realization that though he had shared a bed many times with this woman this was the first time in many years that he was actually sharing it with the girl he had married, with the one he loved. He thought of all the extra effort he had put into the deed this time around to elicit precisely this response,and grinned mischievously. "What about it?" he asked.
"Grandma said a lot of crazy, crazy things in there," she told him, looking directly into his eyes."Crazy things. Things I don't want to repeat. Things I don't even want to remember." She broke down suddenly and the tears began to flow like raging rivers over the delicate contours of her cheeks. Harry held her tightly, securely.
"She said," she barely managed to sputter, "...she said that she was a witch, and that she was going to live forever. And she said she didn't like you, Harry." None of these revelations surprised Harry in the least. Elizabeth was weeping uncontrollably now and all Harry could manage to gather was a few more words from her incoherent ramblings.
"Knife...soul...watching...curse..." And then suddenly, "It's YOU Harry!"
She suddenly stopped crying and was coldy silent.
"What's me?" he demanded, "What in Christ's name are you talking about, woman?"
But she had come to her senses, so to speak: her guard had returned to his post; the centurion was in place
"Nothing," she said.
Harry fumed. "Nothing!? Nothing!? You lay there and sob and moan about black magic and Ginsu knives, talkin' your Great Grandma's mojo bullshit, and then you get serious all of a sudden and you look me dead in the eyes, and I'm sure it was YOU looking, and you say, 'Harry, it's you!', and NOW all you got to say is 'Nothing'!?"
"I don't want to talk about it any more!"
"That does it," Harry said, jumping up out of bed and wrapping the wet sheet around him, "I'm getting' rid of that Goddam knife!"
Genuine terror flashed through Elizabeth's eyes. "No," she gasped.
"I'll give you one last chance," Harry told her, "One last chance to give me one single, solitary reason why I shouldn't throw out that old coot's knife. It ain't valuable. It ain't really even sentimental, now, is it, considering how you obviously really felt about her?"
But Elizabeth's centurion was strong. "You go before the knife goes, Harry!" she said, and she ran off naked and shivering into the bathroom.
Now Harry had planned out exactly what he was going to do if it ever came to this —he just couldn’t believe that this time it was actually going to happen. But it was. He put on one of his better suits, stuffed a few essentials into his briefcase, and snatched the envelope containing $10,000 cash which he had taped to the underside of the dresser in anticipation of just such an occasion. He was out the door before Elizabeth had even taken her sleeping pills and slipped away into the bathtub.
Harry took the BMW. "Leave the Saab for the bitch," he thought, and he also took the Ginsu knife, a deed which he later would very much regret. "That'll show her!" he reasoned. "She'll lose her husband, and the goddam knife! What'll they do, put me in jail for it?" This thought was actually one of the more rational ones raging through Harry's mind at the moment.
He peeled out of the driveway announcing as it were to all his peeping neighbors that he and Elizabeth had had another fight. He drove to a dive hotel on the other side of the city.
When he got there the first thing he did was take a shower, singing loudly and in a pleasing baritone, "I'm gonna wash that girl right outta my hair..."
When he stepped out of the bathroom his view of the room was initially blocked off by the frenzy of two hands and a towel moving frantically about his head, but then he suddenly gazed upon it lying right there on top of his clothes in the open suitcase sitting on top of his bed.
"I didn't leave it like that," he thought.
He walked over to the bed and hiding his face with the towel (as if this would protect him) he stuffed the knife back under his clothes and closed and latched the suitcase on the wretched blade.
For the first time ever he really wondered if there might actually be something to the crazy old lady's delusions. He immediately thought of his wife, alone in what used to be their house.
"No, no, no!" he said aloud. He had wasted thirty years with that ever-increasingly distant harpy, and he deserved better. He wasn't going to let himself talk himself out of it this time.
He had worked himself into a bit of a rage when he walked over to the dresser upon on which he had lain the envelope containing the money. He tore open the envelope, trying to steady his breathing. But, alas, his breath was not to be steadied for he found the envelope empty. His rage exploded into full blown fury. He suddenly turned to face the bed, and there it lay, right on top of the clothes again in the open suitcase.
Harry began to laugh hysterically and the reflection in the knife, which also laughed, made him laugh even harder.
Elizabeth awoke in the lukewarm bathwater as wrinkled as a prune . She dragged herself up, dried herself off, and slipped into her white silken nightgown. She felt under the dresser, finding the envelope gone. She grinned mischievously and said to herself, "He'll be back!"
She went into the kitchen to make some tea and when she flicked on the light she noticed immediately that the knife was gone. "Sweet Jesus!" she uttered. But she knew she was helpless to do anything. It was all up to Providence now. She made some tea and settled into the easy chair for a late night movie. Three hours later she awoke to a pounding on the door.
"Open the Goddamn door right now, Elizabeth!" came Harry's detached voice. "Open the door and it'll be so much easier for both of us.
Elizabeth stood just inside listening, sensing in his tone his mood, and she found herself almost certain that she didn't want to open the door.
"Go away!" she yelled into the door. "Come back when you're sober!"
"Oh I ain't been drinkin', Ma," Harry slurred in cruel jest. He was answered with only silence. "Elizabeth! I ain't drunk. Let me in!"
That time it had sounded like Harry, but Elizabeth still wasn't sure. And if it were true that he hadn't been drinking then Elizabeth realized that she had more to worry about than she had initially realized.
Harry began kicking at the door.
"Stop it!" she pleaded, "You'll wake up the neighbors!" She tried to deadbolt it but it was too late; the door came flying violently open, knocking her delicate hand away from the lock. And if any of the neighbors did awaken during the commotion they failed to live up to expectations and simply rolled over and went right back to sleep. So there in the doorway her husband stood, wearing a suit which had been shredded to rags and wielding in his hand her Great Grandmother's Ginsu knife which Elizabeth wholeheartedly believed contained her Great Grandmother's wicked old soul. And suddenly all the things her Grandma had said to her that dark and sinister night came drifting back to her like so much flotsam and jetsom, and the flood of emotion carrying it nearly swept her away. She screamed in terror and fled into the kitchen.
"Come on, Lizzie," Harry sneered, "Granny wants to give you a kiss!"
Elizabeth screamed again, louder, and scurried through the drawers for a weapon of some sort. He caught up with her holding the frying pan.
"You stay away from me!" she screamed in terror.
"Come to Grandma," he yelled, lunging violently at her with the knife. She deflected it with the pan and moved off into the bathroom. Just in time she shut and locked the door.
"I could kick this door in, Lizzie," Harry told her, his cold breath right up next to the keyhole. Inside, Elizabeth cowered in the shower. But then something in her awoke, something old and forgotten. She stood up and muttered, "I'm not going to die in the shower like that bitch in Psycho. No way."
Stepping out of the shower she turned on the hot water so that steam poured out from behind the curtain. She turned off the lights.
"You taking a shower in there, you crazy bitch?" Harry yelled into the door. He stood back and kicked it free of its flimsy frame. Slowly he crept toward the shower, Ginsu knife poised and ready to strike. With his left hand he grabbed the curtain and ripped it away. From behind the door and with all her might she shoved him into the scalding shower and then whacked him on the head with the cast-iron skillet just for good measure. She ran to her room, locked the door, and fell down on her knees. "Good Lord," she begged, "save us from that evil old woman's spell."
Harry awoke to stinging pain and a throbbing head. For a moment he collected his thoughts, then a strange and familiar gleam returned to his eyes. He grabbed the knife and headed down the hall to the bedroom. In no time flat he was through the door but was momentarily taken aback to see his wife lying on their bed wearing a snow-white nightgown.
"If you're going to do it, Harry, you're going to look me in the eyes," she said immediately.
Harry's evil gaze focused on Elizabeth and he began to stalk like a panther through the bedroom.
"I remembered something else Grandma told me," Elizabeth said casually. "She said when this night came it would either bring us closer together or destroy us both." Harry slowed his pace.
"She said it would all be up to you. She didn't think very much of you, Harry. She said if your love for me was really true, then I had nothing to worry about. She was banking that it wasn’t." Harry stopped right beside her, the knife poised rigidly against her throat.
"You don't really want to kill me, do you Harry —trap my soul in that knife so the old lady can have my body? What do you think she’ll do with yours once she has mine?" Harry began to waver.
But the old woman grabbed hold again and Harry screamed in a raging voice that was not his own, "Die you little shit! I always hated you —you and your dirty slut of a Mother!"
"She's putting our love to the test," Elizabeth managed to utter before finally breaking down in tears. Harry began to tremble as something lost control over him. He dropped the knife beside the bed and climbed in beside his sobbing wife and embraced her, slowly calming her and bringing her back to their reality. Their reality. Somehow he knew it was all going to be different from now on.
"In the morning,”he proclaimed, "I'm going to throw out that Goddam Ginsu knife!"
This time there were no objections.
© 2007 Randy Bone