Steeled

You are silver and you glint light against walls as you move, blinding and smooth as you carve through resistance. The sound you make as you connect with wood is thudding but comforting, a repetition that speaks of solidity, of wood and blade. You have belonged in these hands for years, the ones that freed you for the first time from the confines of unyielding smoothness. Then you greeted the air with your edge, slicing breeze like butter. Here you are used skillfully, a tool put to work to write love in the way these hands know best. Fruit and vegetables cut in precise cubes, sandwiches that weep jelly out of sides where thick crust has been removed. They speak of care and effort in the smallest parts and your part is the pen with which this effort is written, a lingering spot of ink shining from a page that laughs with joy. You are put to good use here, years of smiles and always sturdy. You are as reliable as the hands that hold you, warm and ready to help. Their grasp is steady and holds you firm. You greet the warmth of the hold whenever it meets you, a hug given unknowingly but never rejected. With love and years of cubed fruit and crust-free sandwiches, you help to build a home from the foundation up, laying brick by brick with every carving.

When you lay forgotten, settled into the back of a clattering drawer comfortably, it is as if you could know sorrow. There is no sense for a tool if it is not needed and with both sides dull you are worthless. With every movement of the drawer you slide further into the shadows, but no one will take the time to notice you. You remain out of reach of all grasping hands. You remain as time passes, shadows drifting through the crack between wood and granite, as the wood begins to creak with the effort to move, as the movement slows to a stop and dust gathers. You wait in darkness until you are flat and grimy, until you are forgotten, until you know you have nothing left to offer.

The hands that hold you next are calloused and strong. There is nothing of the gentle love that seeped from hand to wood but, still, they hold you with care. It is respect that holds the hands where they are, and while it isn’t the warmth and never will be, it is close enough to the same. The hands are sturdy and familiar in a way that matters, and the unfamiliarity fades with time. When you meet stone you are healed to sharpness, and you can almost taste the fruit and vegetables again, the crusts of wheat. When you return to the hands they do not return you to your darkened prison but, instead, to a new home. The confines of the smooth wood are comfortable and strangely warm against your sides. You are useful again, now, your smile sharp. The hands do not greet you daily and you never again taste the soft wheat of unwanted crust. You develop a taste for charcoal, fat and rich earth that consumes you as you consume it. It is strong, just as the calloused hands, and you welcome the newness of it all. It is warm enough, now. Very rarely, when you taste sugar against you, your edges sing of a warmth that you should have long forgotten.

It is from here that you watch the world pass by, sun to moon to sun and back again, light bleeds to dark as time continues its endless cycle. Around you, the room changes, picture frames put up and removed on the wall across from you. The counter beneath you gathers dust until it lies under a thin layer and the room becomes colder. As the days pass you remember only two pairs of hands, the familiar weight of the hands that saved you, still calloused, now with a strength that feels dark and seeps the room in bitter shadows. The other hands you remember are soft and small, not yet met with the hardships that must wait outside this house to make hands as harsh as the other pair. The small hands hold you with comfort, a steady grip on wood, and sometimes fingers attempt to poke metal gently. The child likes to tempt danger and you are always willing to oblige. Still, she returns often. Sometimes she tilts you to watch the light from the window bounce off of you onto the ceiling. Other times she stares at you as if the reflection of her eyes within you holds answers, despite the fact that your wisdom is unshareable. You are there whenever she reaches out and, soon, her hands, steadier as the years go by, are the only familiar ones.

In the hands of this girl you are worthy again, a tool once more, but one of a very different kind. You are a mirror until the day that there is no longer a need to see deeper inside. When it happens, there are no words for the taste of fear, for shaking hands that move with a force insurmountable, and the feeling clings to the edge, ready for a mouthful of what you will meet. Those once familiar calloused hands reach out to hinder your path but you, in this moment, are an inevitability that not even a miracle could prevent.The wailing crescendos and stops to a violent silence that even air could ruin. Copper is something you have tasted before, sharp on the tongue and warm on steel but it is strange to taste so much of it at once. You are stained, far from the familiarity of rust, and when you meet wood this time the fall is slow and the thump is horrifying as it yells out into silence. The stillness is stunning after the cacophony of the past days. The first sound to break the quiet is that of footsteps that flee and leave you behind. You lay forgotten once again, no longer in darkness. Now you bathe in copper, the glint of your smile menacing. You rest near outstretched, unmoving calloused hands and your silent laughter darkens the room. You lie there for longer than you should, waiting for a hand to return you to your home, but when one does it is not the small hands you know. These hands are stale in the most bitter kind of ways, an aftertaste so sour on the palate that you dwell on it for hours, unpleased by the way it felt against you. You leave the wood behind and again you are placed where you first began. The walls of your familiar prison are smooth and chill to the touch, sealing you off from the air and the taste of anything other than chemicals and copper rust, and the red has tainted your sight until it is all you see. Still, you smile, feral behind walls.