Knife

Brian had always feared knives. He feared them first in his fathers hands before he left them, remembering the way they cut his meat the same way they cut his mother. Then he feared the sick flash of reflected light in ally's near his home, when Brian feared his mother might not make it home from work every night.

So when the doctors told Brian they would have to cut his son out of his wife, he was terrified, but she was too, and so he held her hand and smiled and forced himself to forget the scalpel that sliced her soft skin.

But when his baby was born from the path cut with the steal he had always feared, he couldn't help but be grateful for the thing that his father had wielded at his mother.