Scissor Points Day!

People fall in love, hold each other waiting for train arrivals, buy ice cream for each other, smile at work, choose apartments together, fuck on couches, marry, keep scissors in the house.

People rent videotapes, pay utility bills, put gasoline in automobiles, worry over finances, recline into easy chairs and discuss making babies, gather up the hem of the warm blanket of domesticity, entertain offers of quick money to take out local dollar store shopkeepers' burgeoning competition, consider providing for babies and becoming men who can give their wives anything they request.

People pull away a bit, build themselves into a place alone to protect the ones they love from the acts they're about to commit. People plan and keep mum, stake out till all hours making notations and taking caffeine. People lay down late, wake up early, shout when asked to take out the garbage. People who are about to take a life resemble people unhappy with the life they've chosen.

People get suspicious, assume the worst, or at least the worst within a certain frame of reference. People know when they've been told a lie, when they're playing the fool, when everything wonderful is about come tumbling down through no fault of their own. People demand explanations and get no specifics. People decide all is lost and want vengeance.

People get on the same train as a dollar shore shopkeeper with a pocket full of money. People sit at the other end of the car. People pretend to read their newspapers, spying out the corners of their eyes, rise with rehearsed sighs to get off at the number of the stop that's circled in their notebooks.

People follow a dollar store shopkeeper from across the street, from half a block away. People approach the turn down a mostly industrial street at 3 AM. People run ten steps causing a dollar store shopkeeper to stop in his tracks. People pull a gun that's never been fired out of their pockets and people send three bullets through a dollar store shopkeeper's round left pectoral. People make it look like a robbery, take the cash from a dollar store shopkeeper's pants pocket, mentally attaching the amount to the number 10,000 to be supplied by a well-established dollar store shop keeper who doesn't tolerate his business being taken away.

People no longer wonder why a husband might come home at 5 AM without any explanation. People know where he's been, know that the absence of a scent of perfume only indicates the thoroughness of the betrayal. People pretend to sleep soundly, having made their decision. People wait for snoring, go to the sewing drawer, return to the bed and drive scissor points into the space just behind a voicebox. Done, people open the scissors, close them once, they're scissors after all. People wonder what just got cut in two.

Happy Scissor Points Day!