Blades of Grass

We decided we had to move Saturday. The weather had been so nice Monday thru Thursday, and then on Friday clouds would appear. On Saturday, it would rain and the rain would continue until early Monday morning when the sun would come out again. It was cruel. The weather was taunting us. We had to respond. Bullies must be stood up to. It doesn’t matter if they’re meteorological.

Such is the story of how we changed Saturdays to Mondays.

Now, Mondays would be rainy as would Tuesdays (sorry Tuesdays), but Wednesday straight on thru Sunday would be gorgeous. We had done the impossible. We had defied nature. It had given us no choice. You cannot deprive people of sunshine. It is inhumane. A Mother must feed her children. We were starving.

Chomper died a month after the days were shifted. It took us a moment to remember what day it actually was, but what is “actual” once you’ve agreed to re-label reality. Chomper died on a Sunday, but it was really a Friday. That seemed authentic. He never would have died on a Sunday. He was not that kind of dog.

After the funeral in our backyard, one of the children was playing in the grass and picked up a steak knife. His mother, my sister-in-law, Maria Louise, ran over and knocked the knife out of his hand, thereby startling the child. He was already upset about Chomper, and now his mother was inflicting what he perceived to be corporal punishment on him simply for picking something up that shouldn’t have been on the ground in the first place. As he wailed, Maria Louise held him and apologized profusely. After one of her apologies, she looked over at me with a searing accusation on her face, and spit out the following--

“Why are there knives in your grass?”

I had no answer for her.

Now, did I have suspicions? Yes. I did. I suspected that once the laws of society were adjusted, even ever so slightly, things that had been logical would cease to be. For example, I went to the supermarket and ran into a woman I knew in high school who told me that her husband had died suddenly after developing an allergy to his steering wheel.

“It was the craziest thing,” she said, tugging at the black pearls around her neck, while her cart was loaded up with radishes, “One day he touches the steering wheel, and the next thing you know, he’s keeled over onto the horn. Everybody in the neighborhood came running. I can still hear that horn. I sold the car and everything and I can still hear that horn.”

I offered to pay for her radishes, but she wouldn’t let me.

We all suffered strange losses during that time. One of us was broken up with via cereal. One morning, the words “I can’t do this anymore” was spelled out in Cheerios on the kitchen floor. Another person lost their Great-Aunt when she decided to go zip-lining and a group of hawks appeared out of nowhere and attacked her the entire way down. And yes, there were also the knives.

Every yard had them. All kinds of knives. Steak, butcher, and a few butter knives, but not many. We couldn’t walk barefoot in our yards anymore. No matter how many we picked up, more were found the next day. It was almost as though they were growing up from the ground. On Friday nights (Wednesday nights), as we would get ready to go out, we’d hear a scream and when we’d look outside our windows, we’d see that the Gallagher boy, six-years-old, had gone running through his front yard and had stepped on a Ginsu. Luckily, he didn’t lose the foot, but he needed stitches, and the Gallaghers had to spend all night in the emergency room with the father complaining--

“What’s the point of making Wednesday a Friday if you’re going to spend it in the ER?”

We had no answer for him.

If I may speak to a singular experience I myself had, I would talk about the time I went out back to pay my respects at Chomper’s small memorial only to find that his plot was surrounded by bread knives with the blade up. I backed away slowly as though I thought the knives were going to come flying through the air at me. Perhaps I did think that at the time. Inside the house, I went to pour myself a bowl of cheerios to calm down, and inside the box, I found a wedding ring. I stayed in that night even though it was a Saturday (Thursday) and I had plans to go dancing with my friend Bess, who had recently lost her partner in a vintage clothing store. There were Missing posters all over town, but none of us thought we’d ever see the woman again. Bess would have to move on with her life. That was why I had invited her dancing, but then I backed out, and when I called to tell her, she seemed relieved. Who really felt like dancing anyway? All music had begun to sound the same.

We began to go out on Mondays (Saturdays). It felt inappropriate, but we did it anyway. Hadn’t we worked so hard to change the days and for what? To simply start changing what days we socialized and relaxed and day drank and night drank and ate unhealthy food and made love and had barbecues and birthday parties? It’s not that it stopped raining. It didn’t. And it didn’t matter. We had barbecues in the rain. And the knives never seemed to appear on Mondays (Saturdays) so as long as someone picked all of them up the night before, we could run through the grass in the rain and the children could play and everything was safe, but wet. Soaked, but familiar. Nobody died and nobody disappeared and one time we heard barking, and it sounded like Chomper. We ran into our backyard, and his grave was covered with flowers. They had grown all over the little tombstone we put there since our last visit when the knives scared us off.

We knelt down and asked Chomper to forgive us.

It was only then that we realized, while looking at the tombstone, that we had neglected to mark down the day that he died.