The Knife on the Necklace

I found it in a basement consignment store downtown on the last day of May, while thunder knocked against the sky. The knife is silver, folded into the body of a brass fish, hooked into a metal circle, and fits perfectly in my palm. 

I wear the knife around my neck, on the same chain as the golden hawk pendant my grandparents gave me when I was in high school. That summer, I had seen a medium in New Jersey. She told me my late uncle watched over me through hawks. Driving away from her office, a hawk was perched on every telephone line. 

The knife is heavier than the hawk pendant, but its weight comforts me. 

To unfold, I fit my thumbnail into the curve of the handle and draw it back like I’m opening a door. The blade isn’t sharp, but it’s still a utility. I use it to open packages or cut stray strings away from my shirts. Once, my roommate and I were walking through a parking garage when a girl stopped us to ask if we could help her stagnant car. We used the knife to cut a plastic water bottle into a funnel to feed oil into her engine. When I re-clasped the necklace, a petal-shaped oil stain bloomed against my sternum. 

I had always wanted a knife of my own. As a child, I secretly admired my father’s pocketknife, with its double blades and faux mother-of-pearl casing. He found it on the floor of the downtown bar he cleaned for a living, or next to the dumpster around the back. Perhaps one of his friends that always asked to crash on our couch gave it to him as some token of gratitude. 

As I grew taller, leaner, supposedly more appealing, he began to lend me the pocketknife whenever I walked up our dirt road to get the mail, or to the Minit Market to get an ice cream bar. He would tell me to have both of the blades already unfolded and protruding from my fist as I walked. “If a man ever tries to take you,” he’d repeat, “stab him quick, and not just once.” 

Years later, he asked me why I was so afraid of men. 

Wearing a knife around my neck, no matter how small and dull, sends the message that I am on high alert, or prepared for violence. I am neither—even after growing up in violence, nobody can ever be truly prepared—and yet I wear the knife all the same. I don’t have to use it; I just have to touch it. To have it resting right next to the hawk, symbolizing the first great loss of my life, feels like resilience: Here is what I have lost, and here is the security I have made for myself from its aftermath.