Don’t ever talk about it
by Kip Knott
He was ten-and-a-half the first time he thought about it. That was the summer his mother died. He thought about it after his father had burned the cheese quesadilla he asked to have for dinner one night.
His mother made quesadillas perfectly. She even sprinkled salt into the oil before she put the quesadilla in the pan so that it would be extra crispy and salty, like the best French fries. And she even went the extra mile by cutting up a lemon so that he could squeeze the juice over the whole thing, something he learned from her that made it taste even better.
His father didn’t put salt in the oil. Or cut up a lemon. His father just burned the quesadilla beyond any flavor other than bitter. So when he didn’t eat it, his father sent him to bed early. And that was when he thought about it for the first time.
He tried to tell his sister about it. He even pulled up his shirt and showed her the little “x” he had made over his heart where his mother said his soul lived. He wasn’t exactly sure what a soul was, but his mother said it was the most important thing that made him who he was. She said it was the thing that she loved most about him. “Your body’s just a temporary vessel,” she told him. “Your soul goes on forever.”
His sister cleaned off the little “x” with her sleeve before she pulled his shirt down and told him, “Don’t ever show that to anybody. Don’t ever talk about it. Daddy’ll give you the belt if he ever finds out. Now go on back to bed.”
He didn’t think about it again until he was eleven. At least not in any meaningful way. He did keep hidden tally marks that counted each month that had passed since his mother died, but no more “x”s.
This time he thought about it when he caught his father crying in the bathroom. He heard whimpering coming from behind the door and thought that Barney, their beagle, had gotten locked in the bathroom again trying to drink from the toilet. When he opened the door, he saw his father slumped over a mirror in his lap, sniffling and crying.
“Get the hell out of here!” his father screamed, knocking the mirror to the floor where it shattered. “Now see what you did? Get the hell back in your room! Go to bed! No dinner!”
In his room, he climbed into the space between his bed and the wall. This is where he liked to go to think about it. The space was tight, and he thought it felt like his mother was hugging him whenever he wedged himself in there.
He pulled up a small flap of the fluffy cloud wallpaper his mother had hung in his room before she became too tired to get out of bed. Beneath the paper were the nine tally marks he had carved into the wall just above the baseboard with his father’s penknife. He had found the knife after his father had dropped it one day in the long grass of the backyard and had given up looking for it. The tally marks were rough under his fingers as he counted them one at a time.
He reached under his mattress where he kept the penknife and pulled it out. He opened it carefully and held it up so that the blade glinted in the light of the bare bulb over his bed. He looked at his wrists and thought about the bracelets his mother always wore. She didn’t just wear one bracelet on one wrist. His mother wore at least a dozen beaded bracelets on each wrist. So many that they ran partly up her arms beyond what could be called her wrists.
It wasn’t time yet to add a new tally mark, so he closed the blade, slid it back under the mattress, and pulled out the magic pen his mother had given him when he started the fourth grade. It was a magic pen because it could write in six colors: black, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red.
“That’s something only a sissy would have,” he remembered his father saying. From then on, he kept it hidden in case his father decided to take it away.
Now he clicked each color and took his time drawing six lines around each wrist before he slid the pen back under the mattress next to the knife.
He went to his sister’s room. “Look at my bracelets,” he said, holding his arms out for her to see.
His sister grabbed his hands and yanked him close to her face. “What’re you doing?” she whispered-yelled at him. She dropped his hands for a moment, spit into her own hands, and then furiously rubbed the ink off of his wrists. “What were you thinking?” she said, almost crying.
“They’re like Momma’s bracelets,” he said, nearly to the point of tears himself.
“Don’t ever talk about it. Nobody wants to hear about Momma’s bracelets. Especially Daddy. There. Now you’re clean again. Go on back to your room.”
Back in his room, he thought about it as he rubbed his wrists that stung the way they did after losing one-too-many games of “Rock, Paper, Scissors.” He thought about the little “x” that had become a soft pink scar over his heart after nine months. He thought about the soul that lived under that “x.” He thought about how his grandma had told him that his mother’s soul was waiting for him in Heaven. He thought about his soul flying up to Heaven to be with his mother. He reached under his shirt and rubbed the small “x” with his fingers, and as he thought about it, he could feel something in his chest itching to get out.
Kip Knott is a teacher and an art dealer specializing in vintage and antique paintings. He spends most of his free time traveling throughout Appalachia and the Midwest searching for lost art treasures.