The Wrong Knife

The lemonade was bad. I'll state that up front, except that's a phrase I promised myself I'd stop using, so let's just say the lemonade was bad and I was drinking it anyway because I'd paid four dollars for it.

My name is Mara. I'm 34, I write for a living, and mostly I write other people's stories. Ghostwriting, they call it. Somebody hands me a stack of notes about their divorce or their fishing trip and I turn it into something that sounds like them on a good day. It pays fine. It also hollows you out a little, year by year, until you're a shell made of other folks' voices.

So when my editor called in June and said, "Mara, drive out to the Burlap & Blade County Fair, cover the artisan knife competition, twelve hundred words by Friday," I said yes before he finished the sentence. Twelve hundred words about knives. That I could do. That was mine.

The fair was in a hollow in rural Tennessee, a county I won't name because the people there were kind and don't deserve internet traffic. Fried dough smell everywhere. Hay. A midway that sagged to the left. The craft tents sat in the back row, lined up along the tree line, and by six in the evening the crowd had thinned to stragglers and kids on sugar crashes.

I had a notebook and a lukewarm lemonade and a deadline breathing down my neck, and I was grumbling my way down the row of trailers, hunting for the pie-judging sign-up, which was supposedly in the same building as the restroom I badly needed by then.

The tent said KNOX CUSTOM CARVE in block letters on a banner. I figured restrooms, maybe a knife demo, maybe a quote for my article. I ducked under the flap.

No restroom. Just workbenches, wood shavings, and a man.

He was tall, somewhere near forty, forearms like he used them for something real, in a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was wiping his hands on a rag and he lit up when he saw me.

"There you are," he said. "You're early. Or I'm late. One of those."

"I'm sorry?" I said.

"Trey Knox." He stuck the rag under his arm and offered his hand. I shook it. His grip was warm and dry. "You got my message about parking behind the trailer, then?"

I had not gotten any message. I opened my mouth to say so and then, God help me, I didn't. Because he was already talking, waving me further into the tent, and it occurred to me that this was a story. A real one, falling into my lap. A man who ran a whittling demo at a county fair and apparently expected appointments in the back of his trailer. The writer brain lit up like a slot machine.

"Just so we're square," he said, and here he slowed down, looked at me straight, "same word we settled on the phone? You say it, everything stops, no questions, no hard feelings."

On the phone. Whoever he was waiting for, he'd never met her face to face.

I froze. My lemonade was sweating in my hand. He waited, patient as a fence post, and I could feel the exit standing right there, the easy one, where I laugh and say, oh, I'm sorry, I'm a reporter, I was looking for the pie table.

I nodded.

Why did I nod? I've turned that over about four hundred times since. Part of it was embarrassment. Part of it was that for three years I'd been writing everybody else's wanting down on the page and feeling nothing of my own. Part of it was just that he had kind eyes and I was tired in a way sleep doesn't fix.

"Good," he said. "Then come on back."

He led me past the workbench, past knives laid out on oiled cloth like fish in a market, to a curtain at the far end of the tent. Not the trailer, actually. A curtained-off alcove behind the work area, dim, smelling of leather and cedar.

"Since you came early, we've got time," he said, sliding the curtain aside. "I'd rather have time than not."

"Okay," I said. My voice came out small. He didn't seem to notice, or he was polite enough to pretend.

He turned to face me and his tone shifted, went lower, steadier. "Wrists up top tonight. Turn around for me, facing the curtain."

I turned around. I heard him move, heard a soft click of something metal, and then he took my lemonade out of my hand, set it somewhere I never found out about, and drew my wrists up over my head. There was a leather loop hanging from the ceiling of the alcove, padded, and he fed my wrists into it and bound them with something soft. Rope, maybe. It wasn't tight. It was snug.

"Talk to me," he said quietly. "Nodding's not gonna cut it past this point. You good?"

"Yes," I said. And I was. That's the strange part. Standing in a stranger's tent with my arms up and my heart going hard, and underneath the nerves there was this clean bright feeling, like the first cold minute of a shower.

"Good girl," he said, almost offhand, and something in my chest turned over.

I heard him step back. I heard a whisper of leather through air, a soft suede sound, and I had about half a second to wonder what was coming.

The first stripe landed across my shoulder blades.

It didn't hurt, not like I expected. It was a wide warm thump, a flogger, suede by the feel of it, and the heat spread out from my skin like ink in water. I made a noise. Not my finest moment.

"Breathe," he said from behind me. "In through the nose. There you go."

Another one, lower, across the middle of my back. Then another. He built a rhythm, not fast, not brutal, just steady, each stroke landing a little different from the last, and between them his palm came down flat and smooth over the heat like he was ironing it in.

"Color?" he asked at some point.

"Green," I said, because I'd read enough to know the traffic light thing even if I'd never, you know, done the thing. Thank you, internet research, all those nights of it, for once in your life useful.

"Good," he said, and I could hear the smile in it.

Here's what nobody tells you about being flogged by a man who thinks he knows you. You stop performing. There's no audience, no self to manage, because the man behind you isn't evaluating you, he's reading you, and he already believes he knows the ending. So I just hung there in the loop with my cheek against my own raised arm and let it happen. The ache built low and constant, a hum under my skin, and every time it started to flatten he'd lay down a sharper stroke, right across the shoulders or lower, and my breath would catch and I'd strain up against the rope without meaning to, up on my toes, and then settle, and his palm would smooth it all down again.

"You're quieter than on the phone," he said after a while, conversational, like we were two people shelling peas. "On the phone, Sylvia, I got commentary."

Sylvia. Whoever Sylvia was. I bit my lip.

"I'm saving it up," I said.

That got a real laugh out of him, low and warm. "Well, all right then."

He varied it more after that. A sharp pair, one on each side of my spine. A slow drag of the flogger tails down between my shoulder blades that made me shiver. Then his hand, flat and slow on the small of my back, and I leaned into it before I could stop myself.

"Careful," he murmured, and his voice carried a thread of doubt maybe, or just care. "Lean on the rope, not on me. I've got to keep my hands free."

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Just stay with me."

Stay with me. I hung there and breathed and the ache rolled through me in slow waves, and I thought, absurdly, about my article. Twelve hundred words on artisan knives. I thought about how every scene I'd ever written for other people had a woman exactly where I was standing, tied and aching and wanting more, and I'd written her from the outside, from the neck up, because I didn't know what her body did. Now I knew. Her body rose up on her toes. Her body went quiet. Her body, it turned out, had been waiting three years for somebody to tell