"Green Box Cutter" (Mark)

It was night and I was alone on the first floor. Who is outside, I thought. I went to the window. There was his face, looking in. He was bald and his head shone. I recoiled and went to the interior of the house. My sense of having any special personal situation ended, and there began an impersonal situation which contained me inside of it.

What could I do if we were going to meet. I went through the kitchen drawer, at first very cold and distracted with adrenaline, and then, there came a calmness all through, a calmness coming to meet me at the high hill above some valley. There were pens and dirty coins in the drawer and I saw the bright green box cutter. What a fantastic turn of events, in a nightmare: to be relying on the bright green box cutter. I had never been cut by one.

The razor blade, someone must have loaded it innocently, came forth into the light of the kitchen at a cunning angle when the switch was thumbed. I went outside and onto the sidewalk holding the box cutter. There was a row of streetlights down the block. The air started to turn the metal handle cold. I noticed him standing still in the shadow between streetlights. I felt an obscure gratitude for being allowed to use the box cutter for this perverse and ingenious new application.

For an instant I thought the box cutter was useless. Then, I saw it drag a bloody line or two. To see the blood made a difference. The box cutter was a tool that put us on equal footing. He swung a metal rod at me, a tire iron maybe, and I went beneath it and reached for his body with both my arms.There was a brute solution I had arrived at, which held together with the clarity of a poem: I clapped his back and drew him close with my left hand, to embrace him, and with my right hand went up and down his belly with the razor, listening to the clicks when I knocked his shirt-buttons because he wasn't wearing any jacket. He put his hand against my eyeball; I reached to tear his throat open if I could do it. I felt the box cutter snag in his hard larynx and I jerked it free, following the direction of my cut. All the blood in his neck began coming out on my arms and the temperature made me remember what it was like to wet your pants. I tried to cut the same spot, it was a lucky feeling, but he brought the metal rod to my forehead so that I flopped, trying to hold the box cutter at arm's length so I wouldn't cut myself, and like a firm kick the street hit me in the backbone.

He pulled back into a golf stroke to hit me again; I stood myself into his crotch and forced the razor tip into his thigh so that he fell. I hurried to kneel down on his chest and I cut his face back and forth with steady rhythm, like an orchestra conductor, I tried to let all his life out and kill him by getting his neck opened all the way. There were many fibers around inside of his neck that were like strong guitar strings, that gave and let go of their tension. I pushed in and down, around where his jawbone curved, until the box cutter went through and knocked on the pavement. What most surprised me, during the time I looked at his dying, was the high level of detail I was perceiving all around me without effort, so that, for example, the imperfect edges of his front teeth now had on them a specific set-up of dots of reflected streetlight that turned the enamel orange, and then a different set-up, no less specific, of dots of blood that were matte black.