DAUGHTER—
Most Friday nights, she still returned home to her parents’ house. One evening, there was a new addition to the top kitchen drawer. It was the first time in ten years that they had had a sharp knife in the house, besides the cleaver. Her mother had decided it was time and went out and bought it because it was ridiculous how long it was taking to scrape the scales off a fish. The blade was about twenty centimetres long and five centimetres wide, and it had a pointed tip.
‘Wah, look at that. If you slipped and fell while carrying this knife, you could kill yourself,’ her father exclaimed.
‘Anything could kill you, Dad,’ she said. ‘Walking down the street could get you hit by a car.’ Down by the Maribyrnong River trail he had explained in great detail to his daughters three possible ways a person could die on the walk: they could slip down a slope and fall into the river and drown, they could get bitten by snakes hiding in the long summer grass, or an unexpected bushfire might come and incinerate them.
So it wasn’t enough for him to hide all the knives in the kitchen drawers every evening before bed. Her father took the new knife into the garage and started to saw off the pointy tip with another knife. It took some effort, but finally the tip snapped off. But then he looked at what he had done and realised something. He realised that with the triangle of the tip gone, he had made two sharp edges instead. So he got out the knife-sharpening stone which they had had for thirty years and filed away at those two edges.
He emerged from the garage a short while later and went quietly upstairs. When he came back down, he had a band-aid on one finger. He hoped that no one would notice at dinner, but Alison did.
‘What happened to your finger, Dad?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ he muttered.
Clearly something must have happened, his daughters thought, or else there would not have been a band-aid on it. It didn’t take them long to connect the mishap with the knife and the forty-five minutes he had spent in the garage.
‘Dad cut himself while trying to cut away the sharp tip of a knife with another knife!’ became the family story they liked to pull out that week his finger was bandaged.