The Woman in the Knife Part One
by Benjamin Chandler
When the man first told me his sister said she was a knife, I thought it was a metaphor. Some women make themselves into poetry, but this wasn’t what Leslie Bachmann was talking about.
“This is no turn of phrase, Mr. Nix. She believes she is a knife. If I’m being honest with you, poor Elspeth should be institutionalized, but you can imagine the sharks in the press going in a frenzy over that. The scandal would overshadow our museum’s opening. Three generations of Bachmanns have toiled to gather and share this collection, and we don’t need some unethical gossip monger spoiling all that. It might be just old pots and dusty idols to some, but to my sister and I, it’s our family’s legacy.”
I could understand the sentiment. The Bachmanns had managed to stay out of the public’s critical eye, despite the tabloids’ efforts to find some dirt. Maybe the museum was precisely why the gossip sheets left them alone—they were actually doing something good for the community, not having affairs with starlets or cheating on taxes or snorting three-thousand dollars up the nose.
“How does she think she’s a knife?” I asked. “She into cutting things?”
“No,” Mr. Bachmann said, shifting in his seat. “I should clarify—she thinks she is housing the spirit of an ancient knife.”
I drummed my fingers on my desk’s blotter. “So, a knife’s ghost is inside her.”
“So she says.”
“I didn’t know knives had souls,” I said, shuffling through the papers Bachmann gave me. A color photo of his sister, Elspeth, was among them. She was of thin frame with high cheekbones framed by bobbed, brown hair. Freckles dusted the bridge of her nose and her eyes were dark as chestnuts. I felt I was staring too long at the image and looked at Bachmann. He was pretty much the male equivalent of his sister—narrow faced, freckled, with a mustache trying to look comfortable over his lip.
“They don’t, of course,” he said, shifting in his seat with a heavy breath. “It started with an accident. The museum had received a shipment of artifacts from Tell Fara in the Kingdom of Iraq. The ruins of Shuruppak are there, you see.”
“I don’t know much about ancient history, Mr. Bachmann,” I said.