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A Knifing
There is a man at the gym that always has a sneer on his face – a disdainful snarling that is terrible to me.
It is always on his face when he passes me – specifically me.
My neighbors at my apartment building never look at me and I don’t like that but I don’t take their
lowered gazes as them snubbing me - because the thought that they fear me makes me forgive them.
Maybe I am too sensitive. I remember reading somewhere the phrase “when life laughed louder than we did”
or “at those times we couldn’t laugh louder than life.” When I saw him in the gym I kept inverting that
phrase like a punctilious, adamant linguist.
But the look on this man’s face – that look on his face – so terribly mocking. And the strange thing
is that the sneer has so many translations which are audible to me and the atmosphere around us. “Is
this guy for real?” “Get a load of this guy!” His eyebrows contract and the way the upper corners of his
mouth spread sideways alarms me. I check under my nose for snot; I look at my shirt to see if there is
some terribly dubious stain. What does he tell the other people in the gym?
“What does he know about me? “ I wonder. If he knew my history of violence it seems so odd that
this preppy little man – this man with his cloying manner of complacent suburbia and his pseudo-gentry
gym outfit – would dare sneer at me like that. I look at him – or better said gaze around him – with
docility but that docility turns to dumbness in the context of his sneer; “Get a load of this guy!”
How can a blank look at someone stay blank in the context of such brazen mockery: “Is this guy for real?”
I only see him twice a week when our hours at the gym congeal like cells - like coalescing tumors
greedily digging, digging into the flesh. And every time his sneer throws me off. Me! With a history
of violence! Me! Who now is taking out a kitchen knife stowed in my gym bag and finally, involuntary
as birth, grabbing his throat, putting my strong fingers around his tanned neck, suffocating him.
And.then the knife sliding into his stomach, irrefutable and strong, with an obvious purpose.
I felt his wet blood on my wrist, the knife’s hilt the only solid thing I felt against his nice
wet blue polo shirt. I heard the cries of the women in the gym. I looked at his face. It wasn’t the same.
His eyes were locked upward, as if a trance state had overcome him.
I wondered what compulsion made me even return to the gym and I realized I never had a choice and,
like an avenger in a novel, I had to get that sneer off his face.
After all, ever since leaving jail I have felt as if I were hoisted in the air, exposed, alone, and alienated:
And this guy’s mockery was simply excessive.
Martin Hoeldtke is unemployed and unpublished. He lives in West Virginia, and graduated from WVU.
Email: Martin Hoeldtke
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