13 Knives

Flash Fiction | 5 Minute Read

This story was written in a Stop Writing Alone Writing Prompt Party (to see when this month’s party is coming, check out Stop Writing Alone’s July 2023 Calendar of Events). In this particular Writing Prompt Party we used a Stop Writing Alone RESOURCE called the Zips for Sticks Writing Prompt Tool, you can get your printable copy HERE.

This story is a 5 minute read.

13 Knives

There I was, just standing there, and all I could think was, There are 13 knives in the kitchen. 

There were only two of us, Dedrick and me. 

One winner, one loser. 

One victor, the other defeated.

And only one of us was thinking about those thirteen knives.

Dedrick wasn’t physically abusive, but he knew intuitively how to maim me. I didn’t have the verbal weaponry to cut him the way he cut me, so his outbursts typically ended in my silenced, lacerated spirit lying helpless beneath Dedrick’s points being made, heard and seemingly accepted whether they were worthy or not.  

"Qui tacet consentit," they said, but that was a lie. My silence was not consent, my silence was some form of selective mutism brought on by lack of a verbal artillery. It was time I loaded up my weapons cache in the only way I knew how.

Words were not my answer.

The argument was over a wallet. Dedrick found another man’s wallet in the car. He burst into the house raging about trust and infidelity, calling me a slut and a whore. He told me how he knew I was trash the moment he saw me. He told me I disgusted him. 

I stood predictably silent, unable to make any sense of what wallet he was talking about, but then I remembered, Qui tacet consentit. 

I had to get to the kitchen. As I walked, my mind poked and prodded at the facts hidden within his furies. He found a wallet in the car. I waited for him to take a breath. The wallet was in car I drove during the day. 

“I’m an Uber Driver, Dedrick,” I said. I didn’t lash out with a reminder that I needed to do so to cover the mortgage payments he let lapse. 

This did not silence him.

He spit on my face asking if Freddy McKinnon was a good fuck. I laughed. These new facts were funny.

Fred McKinnon was a priest I drove to an exorcism downtown. I remembered him because you don’t forget a priest who needs a ride to an exorcism. Surprisingly, we didn’t talk about demons, possessions or the existence of heaven and hell, we talked about celibacy.

Father Freddy was proud of his celibacy and open to discuss how he balanced his natural attraction with his oath and calling. The priest was still a virgin, but when Dedrick found his wallet in my car, he screamed at me about the filthy things he imagined I did to the man. 

My mind raced and stumbled over itself as the pieces of Dedrick’s latest interpretations of the truth unraveled. Every single weaponized word Dedrick uttered was shot into me like shrapnel launched at my soul flying off the explosion of his unfounded assumptions. There was so much energy and force behind every new phrase it was hard to believe it came from the same man who allowed the dust to gather in the corners of our own bedroom due to lack of physical engagement. 

Dedrick followed me all the way to the kitchen. He pounded on the counter, demanding my attention while I let my fingers dance along the knife block, counting, “One, two…”

“What the fuck are you doing?” he shouted, finally noticing when I got to seven.

“I’m counting our knives, Sweetie,” I said.

Funny thing happened then. Dedrick finally shut up. Maybe my words were more powerful than I thought.

Leave a Comment and Don’t Hoard this Story!

Do you know anyone like Dedrick? Do you think they’d be silenced by a tour of a local knife block? Even as I revised this story I found myself asking what our protagonist was doing with this guy and I find myself curious about it still. I would not be surprised if Dedrick returns to my fiction some day in a deeper dive to answer this question.

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