kaolin fire presents :: writing :: fiction

"safetyscissors.0"

words

20051019 -- http://www.stwa.net/scrawl/viewtopic.php?t=22147

Kyle cursed as he cut his finger with the safety scissors. It was a lesson he'd take with him far into life--safety led to dullness, complacency, and pain. Because he later decided this was one of his defining moments, he tracked down the news article he'd been cutting out, and had the headline indelibly marked into the front of his consciousness. Karma, he called it. "British journalist missing in Iraq". Karma. Serendipity. Earlier that day, he'd been thinking about about geography--social studies, sixth grade; he was putting off that assignment as long as he could. God, he hated Mr. Kezzen. Now, however, he was working on his English assignment.

In fourth grade, George Kezzen had been his best buddy. Mr. Kezzen. He hadn't called him mister, then, because he was a friend of the family. Well, a friend of his mother's, with his dad always on business trips. His dad had been a journalist, too--a foreign correspondent, but even with that the article wouldn't have meant much.

With a drop of blood just beginning to well along the side of his right index finger, he didn't know at all that two weeks later he'd be in far more pain. He was clipping articles, diagramming the sentence structure and comparing sentence length between periodicals. Kyle brushed his nut-brown hair back behind his ears and stood, pressing the cut against his palm to encourage clotting.

His mother was crying softly, as she often did when his father left. Later, he realised how unstable she was, that while in parts everything she did was rational, or human, the whole of her was just a long-sleeved coat shy of the mental institution. Somehow, she managed to escape that curse his entire life; mostly through the support of loving family. They all cared for her as if she were their own baby duckling; especially after his father died.

In fifth grade, his father and George had had a falling out; a heated fight. He really hadn't understood what was happening, but he'd gotten a taste of it. George wasn't to be trusted. It didn't matter why not, and it didn't matter that he still had to respect him as a teacher--as a human, George, thereafter Mr. Kezzen, was scum. The honorific was a distancing thing. In retrospect, he imagined his mother had cried more, then, but he never did learn the full truth of it.

He didn't learn about Karma until ninth grade, but when the concept came to him he was waiting, ready and willing. It was his to take and mold, subvert to any conversational purpose. That was when Kyle also learned the power of words. He went back and read the articles his father had written, and learned more about him than he had from any obituary, just in the words he'd used, the message you could tell he was trying to convey. Going back over old articles, Kyle could trace the history of his parent's relationship. It was subtle, almost too subtle--at times, he worried about his own sanity, the genetics of lunacy--but mostly, he accepted what he saw, what he read, what he read into things.

He walked into the bathroom to look for a band-aid. That was when it first hit him how absurd it was to have cut himself with safety scissors. He laughed.

He laughed, and ran back to his mother to show her his cut; "Mom," he cried, "Look! I cut myself with the safety scissors! Can you believe it?"

She looked at his wound, just barely seeing it, seeing him. "With safety scissors?"

"Isn't that silly?"

"That's silly, alright. But maybe you should put some antiseptic on it, just in case."

"okay, mom."

Antiseptic. Safety. The cure-all. And humor.

In college, he'd moved to chemistry; first, he wanted to know about matter, particles combining together. He hadn't realized that was more physics until two years later, at which point he'd already focused on the magical element carbon. Organic chemistry. Life.

Life was certainly more powerful than either the pen or the sword. He wanted to write with it, making flesh of his words. To warm up, he began a quest for the perfect flavor.

He never did find the perfect flavor. Nor twenty other things he kept at the top of his life goals for the rest of his existence. But he reminded himself at every obstacle that he'd chosen a life of unattainable goals, and this always caused him to smile.