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.
John Biscello 