The Lady with the Letter Opener

Title: The Lady with the Letter Opener

Author: Tyrone

Dedicated to Lorenzo Kincade & The Spaced Invader for their contribution of letters

She looked down at her feet and the swirls of red, then she looked into her hand at the letter opener, thinking back as to how she arrived at this destination; in her mind she walked backwards, retracing the steps, the very steps that brought her down from her apartment and out into the street; the steps that started not more than five feet from the entrance to her home, where if when she took inventory of it she found a nice, cozy place, with traces of a recently finished dinner in the sink and classical music coming from the radio, a cat, named Jangles, with its purr box on full, and a couch that had seen better days, but fit her body just so, and she couldn't imagine ever replacing, as it took years and years to form that impression into the couch, so on those lonely Friday nights, of which there were far too many to be anything other than a bit sad about at this point, that there was at least the couch there to hug her and the cat there to offer its companionship, but only when Jangles felt like it, and isn't that just how those darling kitties are, so private in their affections, impossible not to love; yes, the lovely cat and the 12 years she has spent with him; her constant companion for over a decade as she watched re-runs of bad television programs and Meg Ryan movies on the television that sat on the 20 year old television stand; sure it wasn't the prettiest thing to look at, but it's not like anybody but her and Jangles were looking at it these days, and it did its job admirably, the television stand, the one she inherited from her father, the cursed, cursed man who left her this and only this upon his passing, deciding to leave the rest of his estate to her brother; how she detested her brother and his stupid wife and their stupid kids living in stupid suburbia, yes, how she did detest them and everything that they had, everything she wanted to see burn down in a fire, but for which she instead settled on just not seeing or talking to them for this was far easier to accomplish; besides, she did manage to make off with the desk, just before old Dad kicked the bucket and that was the crown jewel of all the furniture he did have; my was it ever nice, handmade from a single oak tree by her grandfather, went the story, and true or not, it was damn fine craftsmanship, and there it sat, but a few feet from the television that now had the end credits to yet another Meg Ryan movie scrolling down the screen, and just inside the desk, in the top right drawer, were you here just a few minutes earlier, you would have found a beautiful eight-inch letter opener, vintage brass and hundreds of years old, once owned by her great-great-great grandmother who brought it over from Italy when she immigrated to America, and had been passed down throughout the years from woman to woman in the family, and now that she was finally the oldest living female in the family that meant the vintage-brass letter opener, from Italy, made hundreds of years earlier by a mason in the public market and paid for with Lira earned by her great-great-great grandfather's sheep-herding farm, was now hers and hers alone and something she wouldn't let anybody take from her ever as even more so than the desk, this was the thing she cherished above all else, except for Jangles and his adorable kitty eyes, and his adorable kitty tail, and that adorable kitty purr of his; except for those things from Jangles the cat, who now found the door to the apartment opened and dared to venture out into the city this fine evening, starting first by descending down those very steps that were but five feet from the apartment door, which led into the foyer, whose door was propped open by a newly fallen stack of yellow pages, knocked over just moments earlier by his mama on her hasty way out the door, leaving enough room for the cat to maneuver his way through the slightly ajar door and make his way outside, his first steps outside this very apartment, in fact, and where it surprised him he could still smell that lovely roasted chicken dinner his mama just finished, so he followed that smell down to the corner where he saw his mama, standing there, holding the letter opener in one hand and the bodies of two men, whom he now looked at, lying dead at her feet; as he looked back at mama he saw the letter opener was dripping with blood, and as he looked back at the two men he saw they were bleeding; so back at mama he looked, waiting for the final puzzle pieces to fill in, and they did, as mama looked at Jangles and said, "Every night, for how many nights now, I've said it, those two insufferable fools with all their words. All they're going to do is upset someone or each other and did they really need to have their conversation on the street corner, outside our apartment window and bandy about silly ideas that served little purpose out there in public, when they could just go ahead and do so over the phone or via private correspondance. I suppose I could have managed a few more nights of that, but you know what really got me, Jangles, my darling precious angel, what really got me was when that one fellow said to the other fellow, '...what the French call neo-Petainism,' it was then that I knew I just had to act. Who else was going to put an end to this?"