John Biscello

My mother’s face was reflected in the blade of the knife, its penance and scythe, held to her throat like a vicious question. This is the beginning of fiction. Of me splitting from me and birthing other in the creation of fiction.

This happened once, a long time ago, didn’t it? I want to say yes, but I can’t be sure. The man holding the knife is my father, or someone resembling my father, someone father-like. But the knife … where did it come from? Did I place it there? Didn’t the knife belong, in story and origin, to one of my exes who told me that her first memory was of her father holding a knife to the throat of her mother? Whose father was it holding the knife? Whose mother’s throat was at risk? I cannot see the father’s face. I can never see his face. And I can only see the mother’s face reflected in the knife, so it comes across as a distorted flame-whip of a face framed in narrow silver, in other words the face is unrecognizable, only that it belongs to a mother, somebody’s mother. My mother? My ex’s mother? A different mother? Perhaps this memory belongs to a dark pool of memories shared by a traumatized collective, what has become haunted archetype, a picture you might find on a black mass edition of Tarot cards (designed to represent fears, haunts, patterns): a father holding a knife to the throat of a mother, with a child, outside the frame of the card, witnessing. Forever witnessing.

Yet I am certain that my ex told me this story about her father and mother, yet as soon as I say I am certain, another branch of reasoning appears and tells me that perhaps the memory, in reality, belonged to you, and the words of this memory were placed in the mouth of a character played by your ex, I mean a character based on your ex, and memory was given a makeover. It all gets mixed up. This is the life of fiction writing. Or I should say fiction living. So many masks competing for the same time slots.

The feeling and deep haunt of a father holding a knife to the throat of a mother while a child witnesses, while a child is rendered a mute and dumb witness .. this is real. I can feel it. This is somebody’s mother. Somebody’s father. Somebody’s story.

I see my mother’s face reflected in the blade of the knife, I have seen it, it is there, yet in real life would a face have been reflected in a knife? How would I have seen such a thing? I wouldn’t. This is crisis transformed into a symbolic portrait, into a visual register high in pitch and fantasy. What I saw reflected back to me was what I felt. My fear became the knife, became my mother’s face reflected in the knife, became a need for fiction. I fled without moving. Escaped without moving an inch. Some freezes are as mutable as they are airborne.

This knife is a prop meant to substantiate, justify, and pictorialize a deep and abiding sense of terror. I have placed the knife in my father’s hand again and again. In this respect, I am accomplice to a crime that never happens, only teeters on an edge. I have never placed the knife into my mother’s hands. Or my own. In these visions, I am handless. So holding a knife would be impossible. I am handless, voiceless, and now that I think about it, there’s not much of me there at all. It’s more an echo of me, an intimation and vague outline, a figment of someone else’s imagining.

The knife, in memory, remains fixed in its position as glacial scythe, as a question in place of a cry. It is there. I am not there. I am somewhere else, yet I can see and feel everything. Until I can’t. Until I become the knife, held at a point of no return, waiting for something to happen, for something to end. Revision is something that happens behind your back. When you forget yourself. Reverb is its haunted cousin.