You were carving a skull on a pad of linoleum, fingertips white and insistent on the blade. It was dull, the type of tool you’d find in a sale bin at Hull’s, and its bluntness was starting to annoy me. sharpen the blade on my finger, I thought. my nail may do good damage. It was a useless idea, but an earnest one, as my ideas often are. sharpen your blade on my thumbnail, and maybe the steel will grate off the keratin, and your tool will carve smoother lines, and i’ll get to listen to you carve them.
Once, you told me when you or your partner get sick, taking care of the other feels good and selfish. You’ll fetch blankets and hot tea, table mints for nausea. You’re greedy in your acts of service. no, thank You, thank You.
Since we stopped talking, I’ve picked up linoleum carving. I go in brutal and quick with my shitty Hull’s chisel, but I trip over my instincts and make mincemeat of the clay. My lines are deep but impulsive, my image all scratched. As I mourn my ruined stamps, I imagine you elsewhere, still whittling away at your drawing, Memento Mori etched backwards on the tile. Shallow shavings fleck your placemat. Your jawskin is taut. There are two ways that I can make the fantasy go. In one, you give up and you throw out your chisel, fail at snapping at your project in half. You’re frustrated. You’re miserable. You feel how I feel when I’m faced with you nowadays, when a maelstrom of little failures sour in my gut and I run away red-faced and graceless. In the other, I nurse half a finger.
