POCKET SHARPS — JANNA MILLER
/The blade is shiny and was your mother’s. You draw its steel across a found branch the same way she did, sitting at the edge of the flames, long curls of wood falling to your feet. The pile grows though no one says anything, and next morning you leave an outline of how you were sitting, just the wood chips and a woody shadow, all the disturbed ground twenty paces away. But camp is camp and other girls only want to sing in the dark and practice kissing the backs of their hands like squalling rabbits. The knife you put in the secret space behind your desk in case you need to use it to whittle a bird or confront a stranger. But you pull it out when the desk chair gives you splinters from rubbing your forearms and grinding your teeth because algebra doesn’t add up the way it should and once you skip your period. You gouge it good and deep, first one side and then the other until you break the arms off altogether and throw them in the woodpile behind the shed. There are snakes there, but you don’t mind. No one says anything about the chair, limbless as you push it around your room. Later, the desk comes with you but not the chair, and now you cut with a butter knife by pushing food around on your plate and chopsticks sometimes, but all it does is transfer calories from one place to another and maybe you don’t eat as much as you should. Dull pointy things are easy to grasp. Shirts fall off your shoulder and you wear a girl’s skirt to work, hunger pricking at your thin cheekbones and no one says anything. You check in the desk and your mother’s knife is still there, shiny as ever and you peel back the blade with a faint clicking sound of it falling into place and your hands fall into place too. You are sharp and pointy as well, the hair on your arms bristle and the heat never reaches your eyes but freezes there as hard as they need to be. The front door falls under the blade as dust settles into a wreath like the snake tattoo on your upper right arm and no one says anything, no one ever says anything, but you know your mother would, if she were here.
Librarian, mother, and minor trickster, Janna Miller spends her time annoying lobsters, sharpening the edges of paper, and refusing to take out the trash. She has coerced published works in places like Andromeda Spaceways, F(r)ction, Meow Meow Pow Pow, and Daily Science Fiction. Nominated for Best Small Fictions. Generally, if the toaster blows up, it is not her fault.
