Burial Platform

I used to know how to sharpen a knife. My grandfather, Mike, taught me when I was a child. Once when we'd been hunting some rabbit, he killed a deer. We dressed it there in the forest, in the snow, in a clearing. I was afraid of the ghosts watching us from the edge of the field. I could hear them howling between the trees when we rode his John Deere five-wheeler. Mike let me hone his buck knife on a whetstone and then he slit the deer's belly. Steam rose from it. Mike said the Indians believed this was the deer's soul rising to be with the Great Spirit. He hated the Indians.

I could make knife so sharp if you cut yourself you wouldn't even feel it until you started bleeding. The trick was to find the sweet angle on the stone. You could sense it when the blade caught, and you wouldn't even have to press very hard. Now I'm an adult and I've forgotten everything. I have a complete Wusthof knife set that's so dull I can hack at my wrists and leave only indentations, as though I'd fallen asleep on a headphone cord. Sometimes I get out my stone and steel and slice away until my forearms bulge. But my professional knives only ever smoothen and become more dull.

In the forest I said my dad told me animals go to Heaven, too. Mike hated my dad, who he saw as an effete city-boy. This is why Mike taught me hunting, fire-starting, knife sharpening, and other man things: to keep me from growing soft. I don't know if it worked. I can no longer sharpen a knife and I still believe in ghosts.