Bone A.M. Cousins

Bone

My father takes a knife from a concealed drawer under the red formica table and hands it to me.

The smooth, bone handle, discoloured where it joins the flat blade of Sheffield steel, see-saws on my palm. “It’s been there for years,” he says. The drawer or the knife? I wonder.

But I can’t ask this ghost of a man who turns up in a dream the night before we sort out the contents of his house and life; this man who thinks that nothing has changed and that an old butter knife – the last survivor from the canteen of cutlery, a wedding-gift sixty-five years ago –is all I need to get along.

A.M. Cousins

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