Iron on stone. Iron on stone. Iron on stone. Scraping and scraping back and forth and again and again and then he turned it over. The edge started to show an angle, a slant. The metal turned from black to silver in ragged scratches and shards flaked off in little worm holes of sharp-sided splinters. He turned it over and he went at it again.

What he wanted was a knife, a blade, a shank, a slicer. A point a sticker a stabber a slab of tempered steel tapering into a curve and curving into a point that gleamed like evil. He stood alone in the doorway to the barn. He stood between the inside dusk and outside glare. He stood where the one side of his body was hidden in darkness and the other was blinded in light. The door was rolled open and he was there, sharpening and shaping, sliding the blank of iron back and forth and back and forth into a blade, into a blade.

The chickens moved around, leaving prints in the dust where they scurried. A dog slunk by behind him in the barn. A cow looked at him wall-eyed. A school bus drove by on the highway. He ignored them or maybe he saw them sort of out of the side of an eye. Looked at them so you couldn't know he was looking.

His blue jeans sagged soft and limp with dirt, gone brown where they'd been blue and bleached white where they weren't brown. His t-shirt was white with yellow stains looping around his neck and under his arms. His head was shaved to stubble. His checks were dirty with hair. He stood there and he hacked and spat leaving a splatter of spit in the dirt besides his foot.

He thumbed the blade. Side to side twice. He sniffed. It've been nice to have oil to put between the iron and the rock. This would work but it would never get fine, never come to a feathery metal edge that would break off and leave a lean line. Never get sharp. This would take shoving. This would never slice. This would take the force of him behind it, pushing.

He put it in his fist, blade down to stabbing side, and went up the ladder. The barn ladder was built up from the dark floor to the middle beam up under the roof. The ladder creaked. The barn shifted. A veil of dust sprinkled down and he went up, step by step, hand by hand and foot by foot. He climbed up to the beam and pushed the knife into the beam, into the rope tied up in a knot. He cut the hanging boy down. By then the boy was dead. The boy fell down to the ground with the rope falling behind him in a flutter. He looked down at the boy from the top of the ladder, down at a crumpled pile of a person in the dirt in the dark dusk of the inside of the mid-day barn.

He left his knife, the half-sharpened slab of iron without a handle or a sharp edge, he left it up there. He stuck it in the beam at the top of the barn. He stabbed it so it stuck and then he beat it with the flat of his palm, slammed and grunted and slammed and slammed and swore something and slammed until it slipping an edge between the grain lines and was stuck there for good.