Creative Non-Fiction (Both Auditory & Weekly): Sweeney Todd - Not While I'm Around

And for this week, we take a little foray into the musical theatre. For context, I was imagining the song as performed by Helena Bonham Carter and Edward Sanders in the Tim Burton movie.

It's a little long(ish), so I'm sticking it behind the cut.

I moved easily through the air of an afternoon characterized by gentle humming and an accommodation of my wish to listen to Sweeney Todd while cooking dinner. I felt alone yet present, caught in a lull after everyone fled the kitchen, left me too set the table with Currier & Ives and hand-me-down wine glasses as lasagna bubbled in the oven.

When I finished humming, laying flatware on folded napkins to the tune of “nothing’s going to harm you, not while I’m around…” I drifted back to everyone else, back to cell phone and iPod charger cables being wrapped around hands, secured for the journey home. It was by luck of wanting company that I saw the flatiron on the vanity in the front bedroom. It blended in, waiting to be forgotten as we turned our attentive eyes to toothbrushes and pomade and stray boxer shorts.

I joined in, smiled as I passed, said “oh, I almost forgot, wouldn’t that have been—“

Feeling so betrayed by circumstance that I shrieked and threw the flatiron down on the wood, I was too late all the same: it had already seared a smooth shining line into the flesh of my thumb. Pain never hurts me, not like that, but deep inside I felt tears gather around my heart as we acknowledged the cord had been mistaken for that of an innocent table lamp.

Holding my hand under the tap in the kitchen that just couldn’t seem to run cold, alone again, I remembered a time when I was young, home alone. Working intently with scissors on a craft project when my mother was out, the blade slipped deep and irrevocable into my left index finger. As blood raced from the cut I ran to the familiar pantry shelf, knowing what to do even though I’d never put on my own Band-Aid before.

A bottomless loneliness rolled in from some corner of that quiet empty house. I remembered what my mother had told me about exposing one side of the adhesive, sticking it down carefully, then pulling the other side around to make it snug. Tears streamed down my face as blood soaked through to the surface of my self-applied Band-Aid.

The water continued running warm, room temperature at best, and when I heard someone walk into the room I gave up, dried my hands, blinked my eyes, and returned my gaze to dinner.