Please, Someone Tell Me About a Knife Fight

by Brett Hanley

All I really care about is the mark on his stomach from where he says he was stabbed with a steak knife. It happened at a party, but there’s no time to say more, to tell me the stabbing story. He has to shower soon and get up early. I’ve chosen to be in his room in this way, but I would like to do nothing except run my fingers over where the wound healed, to pretend that part of him is not him, and that it is what I want, and that it is why I’m here. Our first night, in the middle of it, he said I love you accidentally and then I mean I love this. I didn’t notice the mark then, didn’t know he’d been knifed. And I could hear the toads outside croaking at the clouds obscuring the moon, bellowing at them from a bed of clovers the grass cutters would soon take. Tonight, the toads are somewhere else. And I would like to be too.