The Scottish Knife

Buenas noches a tod@s. He escrito un relato en inglés un tanto extraño. Supongo que al principio os costará un poco encontrarle sentido, pero creo que el vocabulario es bastante comprensible y la situación en general también. Espero que os guste y lo entendáis. ¡Un beso!

“Put the knife away, buddy. Nobody here is gonna hurt you. There’s no need to use a weapon against us”.

           

“They are evil, I can tell!”, he cried out, his thick Scottish accent more noticeable than ever. The sharp end of the knife was facing toward me, and probably at that moment I should have been afraid or, at least, felt disturbed. That would have been, no doubt, the normal reaction to experiment in such a thrilled situation, but the truth is I’m not a normal person. And that wasn’t the first time he showed up at my house with a knife in his hand.

           

“No, they’re not”, I replied, trying to maintain a poker face. I have always been good at hiding my feelings and, in this particular occasion, that gift of nature proved to be very convenient. “They are two friends of mine”, I continued, my voice cold and calm like the seas. I needed him to focus on me and forget about the two men that stood behind my back.

           

“I don’t trust them. There is something in their eyes… In the way they look at me. They think I’m insane. And I’m not, I’m not… I’m not!”

           

He was suffering a crisis. Of course, it wasn’t the first time that that happened to me either, but I could notice that my guests were starting to feel nervous. Who the hell is this guy and what is he doing here with a fucking knife?!, they might think. One didn’t need to be a telepath to figure out what normal people would think about a guy like Angus. I held my breath as I tried to find a quick solution to the problem. But first of all, I needed to call Richard.

           

“Don’t”, Angus said through clenched teeth. He was looking at me with wrathful eyes. “I want my brother to stay out of this”. 

           

I will never know how he always managed to find out my intentions, to decipher my deepest thoughts. Sometimes, that power of him made me feel proud of his higher capacities, but most of the time they scared me. Such an intuition used by a person like him was, in the best-case scenario, a terribly dangerous device.

           

“Your brother only wants to help you, no matter what you may think. He is really trying his best and with your attitude, you’re not making things easier”. I made a dramatic pause to emphasis my argument as I took a step forward. Trying to take the knife away from him was completely out of the question—I had scarves on my arms that made evident how stupid and reckless that idea was—, but I could try to make him trust me, by showing him that I wasn’t afraid.

           

“Richard hates me! He wants to lock me up!”

           

My heart broke into tiny pieces when tears started to fill his eyes. Richard had told me that his parents were considering the possibility of committing Angus to a mental institution, since he was becoming more and more violent, and, if they found out about his intrusion in my home, he would be screwed.

           

“Claudia, I think you should step back”, Terry pointed out, his voice tingled with concern. “This man is armed with a knife”.

           

It was the first time he opened his mouth that evening, and I wished he hadn’t done it at all. Angus fixed his gaze on him and a threatening groan escaped his throat. Great, now he was pissed off.

           

“And I think you should shut the fuck up, Terry. I have the situation under control”. But he ignored my advice and moved closer to me, as if he thought that his presence would scare Angus. Silly bastard. With his childish macho behaviour he only made my friend angrier.

           

All of a sudden, when I thought the circumstances couldn’t get any worse, my mobile phone started to ring. Terry opened his mouth to say something, but I guess the look I gave him was eloquent enough to keep him quiet.

           

“Don’t answer”, Angus commanded me, endowing his voice with an authoritarian, nearly military, intonation. I was almost one hundred percent sure that the person at the other end of the phone was Richard, and that he would know his brother had broken into my house again. No doubt at that moment he’d be at my door, waiting for me to open it and let him in.

           

“I need to. It could be important”.

I realized that was exactly the worst answer I could have given just a second after pronouncing those words. He knew his brother even better than I and there was no choice he would let Angus off the hook so easily. My friend knew that if I answered that call, he would be lost. But the phone stopped ringing as suddenly as it had started and a tense and uncomfortable silence filled the room. Terry’s eyes wandered around the lounge as if he was trying to find a sharp object to defend us from what he would define as “the monster”. As to the other man, fear had paralyzed him and he wasn’t even capable of raising an eyebrow.

“Don’t you trust me?”, I managed to ask at last. “Don’t you know I would cut off my arm before hurting you?”

           

I still had power over him and it was time to use it before his brother came into play. He put the knife down and took a step toward me, a shy smile drawing on his face. Nevertheless, as everything worthy in life, it wasn’t meant to last. A knock on the front door broke that magic moment and Angus lost his mind.

           

Cole, who so far had remained silent and calm, decided then to take part in the action, and left the room. Angus looked at me with a mixture of fear, anger and betrayal that hurt me from the deepest part of my heart. I heard Richard’s anxious voice in the hall, talking with Cole about his brother’s last misdoings. But it was too late. He had grabbed the knife again and was holding it against my forearm. He didn’t even have to think it twice. The iron blade cut the flesh as easily as if it were butter, and blood started to flow from the wound.

           

It didn’t hurt. In fact, I didn’t feel anything at all for a while. All I could think of was his betrayed and grieving gaze fixed on me, and his slender figure as he traversed the windowpane with Terry running after him.