She's been my best friend (arguably) for two decades at this point, and I still don't know specifically why knives are a terror to her. I noticed it first as we discovered our weirdly coincident attraction to action movies. Guns and explosions were nothing to her, but the silent blades of Crouching Tiger and Kill Bill drew gasps that shocked me at the time. Even now, I don't know the source, I only know that it's a thing for her.
The closest I've gotten is a story from her childhood in Jakarta. There was a man, of course, in a horse barn that she and her baby sister inhabited or frequented or ghosted in their unsupervised existence on that island. I have only gathered that he had a blade of some kind and the intent of drawing both blood and pleasure from one or both of them.
In the time I have known of this vaguely whispered occurence, I have finished the tale with Mary as the heroic savior of her little sister. Somehow, her tiny eight-year old self was already the kind of warrior who could best a full-grown, armed savage of a man. And, knowing the woman she has become, this is not so unbelievable.
But what is most likely, considering the violence of her recoil at the sight of any blade being raised, there is a more violent end. At the very least, this man has become a spectre that terrorizes her subconscious. Maybe the man himself never got the abject satisfaction he sought from those two girls, but, knowing them both, I can tell you that he left his scars on them nonetheless.
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