Since the divorce, my daughter and I use the oak tree in the backyard of my rental house as target practice. It’s our way of bonding. I convince Sarah to pretend the people she hates the most are standing in front of the tree and so she says one knife is for Derek and the other is for Tiffany. I haven’t been completely filled in on who hates who or why, but it’s safe to assume those friends aren’t her friends anymore. My daughter’s birthday is a month away and while she should want a car or some sort of celebration for her sweet sixteen, Sarah’s adamant she wants nothing. No car. No party. I’ve assumed this is because of the divorce or because of whatever’s happened with her friends, but then I watch Sarah examine a knife with her fingernail, driving the edge down until she pierces her skin. I sense the angst building inside of her and start to consider that maybe the disdain is aimed at myself, her mom, our decisions, anything and everything that makes being sixteen more difficult than the age it is.
“Your turn,” Sarah says.
There’s an arsenal of weapons to choose from. I grab an ax. I don’t pretend my ex-wife is standing in front of me because I still love her too much. I pretend her yoga instructor is there instead, shifting nimbly, bending Ellen into different positions as if she’s elastic. I swing with fury, with a rage I know I’ll never get to experience. When I step back Sarah looks at me as if I’m a different person. We both force smiles. Sometimes she takes me seriously and then other times I feel her pulling away, finding flaws in the way I’ve chosen to cope. Maybe there are better ways to solve our problems. Maybe we could talk and cry and tell each other that everything will eventually work out as time speeds forward but in the moment it feels better to hold something destructive, to warn the world that we aren’t taking any more of its shit.
It’s been three months since my wife of eighteen years, Sarah’s mom, Ellen, left me. Ellen got mostly everything good in the divorce: the house and primary custody of Sarah. I moved out to a squat, rambler style rental in a neighborhood bordered by chain link fences and the highway. I started drinking again. I unpacked my knives and did divorced things like hunt the committee of raccoons digging through everyone’s trash and threaten my pickleball opponents until they let me win. I’d owned my collection of knives for many years. I liked having knives. It kept everyone a blade’s length away. But after a while I got bored and wanted the next best thing, so I enrolled in a forgery class at the local community college. Luckily, the professor, a Greek man named Kostas, was also a drunk. I was the only student. We bonded quickly and spent most nights sweating out liquor, shaping steel over a scorching forge, making axes and swords and flanged maces and testing their strength on dummies from the self-defense classes.
“Weapons will not fill the void in your heart,” Kostas said, as if reciting a proverb.
To prove him wrong I decapitated a dummy with one fluid stroke of a sword.
“I think they might,” I said, knowing I couldn’t stab and slice those emotions forever.
Next weekend I surprise Sarah with a warhammer and some throwing stars but she’s hesitant to touch anything. She says her mom found a knife in her backpack, which led to an hour-long conversation about how nobody can stab their way out of life’s problems. Forgiveness, according to Ellen, is better than any sort of weapon. Sarah lays all the knives I’ve given her on the dinner table and I realize this is how things will be now. I will say one thing and Ellen will say the opposite. We will pull at our daughter until her beliefs are stretched paper-thin.
“Maybe forgiveness should be our first weapon of choice,” she says, reciting some goddamn pacifist mantra that Ellen definitely told her to say.
Sarah doesn’t understand yet. She’s only carried the first wave of burdens that life can pile on top of someone. Forgiving only adds to the pile. The shit heap grows and grows until soon enough you’re buried neck-deep in a landfill of burdens you’ve let grow around you.
Because of these new beliefs, Sarah stays in her room for most of the weekend. She doesn’t join me when I chase the Jehovah’s Witnesses off the porch. She misses target practice. I eavesdrop on her phone conversations. I hear her apologize to Tiffany and lie about never actually having a crush on Derek. The next day, when I ask her if she wants to go and terrorize the Civil War reenactors in the park, she tells me she’s made plans with her friends. On queue, Tiffany speeds into the neighborhood and parks halfway on the curb. As Sarah leaves she gives me this look that says she wishes she was chasing middle-aged men around with a sword instead, and I desperately want to tell her that she can, she always should.
A week before her birthday, Sarah admits she’s changed her mind. She wants a party. Not an extravagant bash but something simple. A tent in the backyard. Cake and games. She’s already discussed this with Ellen but the party would have to be here, with me, because Ellen’s having the backyard completely gutted and redone to erase any trace of my influence. I agree to this, but Sarah says Ellen doesn’t want any weapons to be seen and reluctantly, I agree to this too.
We hand-craft the invitations and I watch her scribble down the names of those who treated her so badly. The whole act feels like a surrender, like Ellen is convincing her to endure a party and surround herself with her so-called friends because it’s what any other soon-to-be-sixteen-year-old would do.
When I drop Sarah off at her mom’s I ask if she wants to smash old appliances at the junkyard the next time I see her. I tell her I can make a special mace for her, something to really crush anything in her path.
“I don’t think so,” she says.
I wait. Her eyes stockpile with tears.
“You can tell me anything,” I say, knowing I’m not the one she tells anything to.
She doesn’t speak. She forces a smile. The car door opens and falls back into place.
I spend the rest of the night stabbing the oak tree. I drink until I stumble and crash into the pile of bursted trash bags. One of my knives stabs me in the ribs, deep, but not deep enough to overreact. I begin to think I’ve made a mistake surrounding myself with these weapons and by doing the same to Sarah I’ve only made her problems worse. My daughter will turn sixteen. She’ll push her true feelings down deep inside of her until they form like a callous on her heart. She will accept all the ways the world can grind you into the dirt.
I wish Sarah were here with me. I wish she never let her hands become empty. I crawl around with the knife punctured into my side and embrace the pain, a reminder that neither Sarah or myself have any right to choose anything other than happiness. Fuck forgiveness, I think to myself. I pull the knife out and think of all the gifts I could get Sarah to let her know she can fight back. A reminder that she can be the weapon and not the target.
On Sarah’s birthday, I hang streamers across the porch’s overhang and spell out her name with puffed pink balloons tied to the mailbox. I mow the lawn, set up the tent, and lock every weapon in my bedroom. In the afternoon, Ellen brings Sarah over. My daughter wears a pink dress and heels that make her stumble through the yard like a baby deer. The two of them wander around with their heads craned; eyes widened, surprised by the effort I’ve put in. It’s the first time I’ve seen Ellen since the divorce. She looks good, so good that I want to break the lock on my bedroom door and cut my nightstand in half with a sword. I expect her to ask me all the questions she’s amassed in our time apart, like why I can’t do the normal things a father should be doing.
“How are you?” Ellen asks instead.
I think of Sarah, of her big day, how I will always be proud of the woman she’s become.
“Never been better.”
Sarah’s friends arrive in droves. They stomp through the house and parade into the backyard. I notice Derek and Tiffany with their hands threaded together. They’re all talking and congealing into groups, spread in and around the tent like spots of mold. I keep an eye on Sarah while the confetti cake continues to bake. I see how her friends speak to her briefly, as if the only requirement for attending her party is to simply acknowledge her presence. My blood boils. The plan was to wait and give her her present when the party was over, when Ellen wouldn’t be there to chastise me for being negligent, stubborn, any other word she could drum up in the moment, but seeing my daughter alone, undermined at her own celebration, forces me to act.
I call Kostas and get him to stop by earlier than we’d planned. Sarah’s gift is crammed in the back of his Corolla, extending out from the backseat window, mixed in with a heavy stock of miscellaneous weapons. Kostas doesn’t ask me if I’m sure about this. We shake hands. I offer him cake and drinks but he says there’s a tree in the park that he’s been wanting to cut down for some time now and drives away.
Ellen brings the cake outside, corralling Sarah and everyone else around a table. Before they can sing or blow out the candles I come walking out with Sarah’s gift held high above my head for all to see. Sarah’s face flushes to a shade nearly as pink as her dress. Everyone’s attention turns to me. The silence is deafening, like all the air has been siphoned out of the yard. There’s laughter, whispers, and glares of confusion. The crowd parts and I bend down to one knee, offering Sarah her weapon. She looks from Ellen back to me, searching for an answer. I urge her to take it. I have a wild look stenciled across my face, one that’s filled with hope and hate and love.
The spear is badass. It’s a three-foot long projectile with a razor-sharp blade. I engraved an intricate lattice design on the shaft along with the inscription, Sarah The Destroyer. It took Kostas and I two days to craft but when we were finished he said it was some of the finest craftsmanship he’d ever seen.
Sarah runs her fingers along the inscription. She tests the weight; cradles her spear against her pink ensemble. It takes a moment, but she wraps her arms around me, and whispers thank you upwards of a dozen times.
My daughter spends the next hour showing off the only way she knows how. An expanse is made across the yard as she hurls the spear at the oak tree accurately, hitting her target each time. Ellen can barely watch. She severs slices of cake. When the crowd moves away I tell her I have every right to give our daughter a gift and she threatens to take full custody.
“It’ll help her,” I say, “She’ll learn from this.”
“You of all people should not be giving our daughter life lessons,” Ellen responds.
Most of Sarah’s friends slunk out through the side gate when the sun begins to set. Some remain clustered around Sarah, in awe as she makes each throw with ease. Even Tiffany approaches with her arm extended touching the spear like it’s a nervous zoo animal. I watch from the kitchen window. I steal sips of whiskey. Ellen is somewhere out front, most likely convincing her lawyers to come back for what little I still have. The wind picks up and shakes the oak tree’s long-limbed branches, steering my attention towards a conversation between my daughter and Derek. Maybe, I think, she’s telling him the truth, that she’s not afraid of anyone’s opinions anymore. This will prove Ellen wrong, I think to myself. This will show her that weapons aren’t just meant to maim and maul. There are plenty of other purposes to carry them with you, keeping all of those who wish to strip you of your happiness away. And this seems to be the case until Derek walks gingerly over to the tree, the same scarred side Sarah and I always sliced and stabbed. Sarah directs him to stand still and Derek follows blindly, arms anchored at his sides, flashing a wide-mouthed grin that slowly begins to shrink. I know I should stop Sarah but I don’t. Everything moves so quickly. She breathes deeply, planting her right leg and raising her arm just like I taught her, near perfect form. When Sarah releases the spear a cascade of emotion rushes in. It’s overflowing, an unstoppable force. It falls over the backyard, over everyone, turning heads; silencing. For a moment it’s as if the clouds have parted and sunlight leaks through, illuminating Sarah, alerting the entire godforsaken world about the kind of woman she is. When I look at my daughter I see a weapon. I see a woman who will no longer let herself become the target.
Derek lives. The spear slams inches away from his skull. In the immediate aftermath he saunters forwards, hands trembling, dabbing at the thin rivulet of blood sluicing down from his temple. Tiffany and a handful of others who watched are shocked into silence while Sarah stands proudly behind them all, her sweet sixteen now officially over.
Will there be repercussions? Maybe. All my knives and swords and every other weapon that Kostas and I forged will most likely be confiscated. I’ll ask my divorce lawyer if he can help quiet whatever storm Sarah’s created. Ellen will remind me for years about the day I almost let our daughter kill the boy she used to have a crush on, how I ruined her birthday party and embarrassed her in front of her friends. I’ll be chastised. I’ll have my parenting brought into question. I might even lose my weekends with Sarah. I really don’t want to think about any of that right now and so I don’t. Instead, I’ll sip some more whiskey and go eat some cake with my daughter. We’ll sit near the tree and imagine nobody we hate is anywhere near us.