Have a jasmine flower. You can stand beside it and feel sultry in a tiny way.




A knife (no photo)

There is a knife in my knife drawer that has a vendetta against me. We were mortal enemies in a previous life, I guess: I must have been a fool who blunted it, using it to cut willow switches or to carve my initials in a beech tree, or maybe I was a careless crafter who ruined it with glue, or maybe I foiled the schemes of the person whose grip around its handle it loved best in all the world---in any case, it vowed to draw my blood in all subsequent lives and worlds in which we encounter each other, and the result is that I *cannot* pick up that knife without injuring myself.

But I feel superstitious about just discarding a knife. Really I'd like to send it to Hamono Jinja, the sub-shrine in Yasaka Shrine that commemorates faithful knives. Mine is not faithful to me, but it's definitely faithful to something, and maybe honoring it in that way would make us even. In the meantime it crouches in my drawer, sneering when I take out some other knife instead of it.