Blunt Once

Irena mows her plot in Troja with a scythe from Austria, a blade she couldn't make if you gave her a forge and a year, and she says so, often, to whoever is leaning on her fence, mostly Dušan, whose strimmer screams like it's been insulted. Every few strokes she stops, takes the stone out of the horn she wears on her belt, half full of river water, and draws it down the edge, one side, the other, a long wet shh, as if the blade were a child at the cinema. On Saturdays she peens it on a little anvil driven into a stump, tink, tink, tink, walking the edge thin with a hammer, and that, she says, is the only part of it I own. In 2002 the river came through here up to the gutters, and when it went down she found the blade in the mud by the compost, and before the shed, before the photographs, before the carpet, she sat on an upturned bucket and brought the edge back. Dušan thought it was shock. It was August, she says. The grass was coming. This summer Aneta from the next plot, who is eleven and has opinions about strimmers, asks if she can try. Irena gives her the stone, not the scythe. Aneta goes at it like a bread knife. Gentler, Irena says. It isn't yours yet. When is it mine? When it's gone blunt on you once and you noticed. Then she goes back down the row, the grass lying over in a long breath, and the girl stays at the fence with the stone and the horn of water, stroking the air, one side, the other, until Dušan, despite himself, switches off the strimmer to listen.