James Kendley

This Kind Nepenthe

 

 

A Faint Black Line 

 

Jerking off at recess, you stabbed me with your pencil. 

The tip went deep; the lead stayed in. 

Over forty years it surfaced, faint and black beneath the skin. 

I cut it out, carnelian jewelling in the wound. 

There is just enough graphite to write your name. 

 

 

 

The Knife Drawer 

 

They were not Arabs. They were adamant on that point and never said more of themselves. 

 

I liked the middle daughter, the slow one with the lovely eyes. The oldest sister, sharper, quicker, came home from college and did not approve, though I sought to please. 

 

The dad burst grinning through the door with tie and briefcase trailing. He noticed everything, so I cooked with the women because this was America, after all. The youngest daughter watched me and the mother chewed her kerchief as I complained about the knives. Every knife in the drawer was dull as a pebble. 

 

One whole afternoon I sharpened knives, hand-honing each blade with a file and a stone and a wedge because I sought to please. 

 

Another afternoon, I came to find the doe-eyed girl. The apartment door stood open wide. The breeze blew wide the curtains. 

 

I found the mother kneeling on the patio slab out back. 

 

Her kerchief stanched her bleeding hand. She left deep scrapes in jagged lines like lightning in the concrete. 

 

She turned, a mask of blood-flecked terror, her unbound hair a gray-streaked shock. 

 

I helped her blunt the knives I’d sharpened. 

 

I always sought to please. 

 

 

 

Royalty 

 

I didn’t believe she was a real princess until I saw the way she shook the safety glass out of her hair. 

 

 

 

La Strega 

 

I hate you, she said, and I wish you would die. 

 

Her mother’s face, so deeply lined, now glazed and caked and shattered. Her mother crumbled to the floor, a mound of dirty salt. 

 

Silent at the funeral, she nursed the power of heated wishes, the power of undoing. 

 

Her grieving father would not eat. Pained, she went to him and said, I love you, and I wish you would live forever. 

 

His mouth, first gaping in dismay, yawned huge and squeezed eyes shut. Arms now crackling tough and brown stretched crooked toward the hidden sky. Roof tiles split and floorboards sundered as her father, towering, sought nurture from the sun above and comfort from the earth below. 

 

 

 

Comaville 

 

She was older, wilder, sexier, A Mile of Dangerous Curves. She had the tee-shirt to prove it. 

 

Confused, I moved to kiss her. She dodged with a laugh and a wink, enough to warm me for a month. 

 

I didn’t have a month. The announcement came last period: a wreck with a boy in a van. 

 

No one knew much, but everyone talked over weeks and weeks and weeks. Some said she sat on the transmission hump. Some said she went through the windshield. Some said disturbing and horrible things about drugs and disease and distraction. Some said poor boy and some said poor girl. I didn’t say a word. 

 

The boy limped smirking back to school. I had to look away. 

 

When she came out of her coma, my best friend dragged me in. The smart-ass girl was all gone. This new girl, wide-eyed, scarred and slack-jawed, said nothing but “buh.” I gripped her cold steel bed rails to keep myself upright. 

 

I hear her now in children’s laughter. I see her in the sparkle of my clever daughter’s eyes.  

 

Online airing little hates or twisted little loves, we’re winners now, big winners, and she was just a dirty girl who lived in an apartment. 

 

But I remember what you said. I have to look away. 

 

There is just enough graphite to write your name. 

 

 

 

Former DM Senior Editor James Kendley is the author of The Mooncalf and Other Tales, a collection to benefit A-rated charities: the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and a Ronald McDonald House in the Florida panhandle.