GEOF THE KNIFER

A Twitter Novel

Geof tested the blade of his knife with his tongue. It tasted bad.

“But bad is just the way I like it,” Geof said, “for I am a knifer of men.” Geof—a bad man—knifed for pleasure, not for justice or for pay.

Geof’s wife wished her husband would stop committing these crimes. At night, she’d look out her window, hoping she wouldn’t see a knifing.

A shriek cut like a knife through the night. But it was not Geof who had knifed this time. The shrieker was Geof himself—a knife in his eye.

With his unknifed eye Geof saw the cackling form of his attacker—the Knifer of Knifers, in a black leather trenchcoat and black leather hat.

Geof lay there in a bleeding pile and swore an oath: “I will have vengeance on the leather-lover, and my own knife will taste his guts.”

“You mustn’t knife another man,” his wife forbade, with loving arms around her husband wrapped.

“I swore an oath,” cried bleeding Geof.

Down the city streets strode Geof, a mission of dark and heinous justice on his tongue and lips. He sought the Knifer-Knifer doggedly.

He strode into a bar.

“I see on that hat rack a hat that I have seen before,” he said, “But which my knifèd eye shall never see again:

“A leather hat!”

Geof crept along the bar with a watchful look in his good eye. He knew his quarry was near, lurking and drinking in the darkness.

And in the dimmest corner of the place—sure enough!—he found the man. His leather back was turned toward Geof.

Geof knifed at that man.

But the sharpest knife—the surest aim—the foulest rage could not have pierced that leather coat. Geof’s blow glanced off nonlethally.

The man in the leather trenchcoat turned around.

“You thought yourself a Knifer-Knifer-Knifer, hm?”

He plucked the knife from Geof’s hand.

Geof’s wife found him on the barroom floor, with his own blood on his lips, with no knife in his hand.

“Oh, Geof,” Geof’s wife wailed. “You wouldn’t listen.”