There Has to Be a Knife by Adnan Khan

Author:Adnan Khan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2019-12-16T16:00:00+00:00

I creak onto the main floor. I count to thirty and examine my breath: one, two, one two, one two three four five. No one is coming. This will only work with patience and calm.

The main floor has small lights: nightlight, microwave, phone, the red eye of the TV. I know her bedroom is next to the parents’ office on the second floor. I don’t know which is which, though. The third floor has a bathroom and the master bedroom.

Up the stairs quiet is easy. I have to guess which door is hers; both are ajar and there are beds in both rooms, but I can see a man’s foot on the bed through the door on the left. The foot turns and I know it’s her father by the movement she picked up from him. She had restless legs and would sweat the bed wet. Her father twists his ankle and it cracks and pops. I stand still. The noise moves through the house like an animal would, and he twitches and murmurs like she would. She said these little quakes were a product of her medication, some antidepressant, but here it is in her father. Unless it’s her ghost inhabiting him. I hope he isn’t sleeping in her bed. I move to the empty room and it’s been cleaned out like a guest bedroom, but it is hers. They’ve moved back everything, all her books and belongings, pens, notebooks. Posters on the wall—Hanson, Korn, Linkin Park. An arc of childhood taste. I’m caught by a savage hunger so good that I stop on the bed and breathe. When was the last time I ate? I remember a little tube of Pringles.

In our apartment, she would look at me from underneath the bedsheets, her bottom half covered, her breasts bare, her journal in her hand. She would ask me not to look at her diary. I never did—I remember once she left it on the bed and I stared at it for five minutes, breathing it in. It had a black card stock cover. I opened it and read the inscription, her full name, the year, how much of a reward she would give if it was returned—twenty bucks. I closed it and let it lie on the bed.

She moved out from her parents’ house, she said, to collect herself, to pull it together. She wanted to go to Montreal, Vancouver, or she had heard about a resort off Nova Scotia or New Brunswick with a hotel that you could work in and never run into anyone you know and save money and sit on that cash like a king. I can feel her imprint in the room. Her diaries would be in the closet. Or they might be with her parents, who might be poring over them for their own forensic work. Would they read them? It would maybe be too soon to learn her thoughts. Could I ask her parents to let me move in with them,

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