Assistant Editor Connor Yeck: Time slows, and space contracts to the tip of a knife in Christopher Notarnicola’s fraught “Steel Beneath Your Chin.” Framed by an altercation between a marine and staff sergeant, the piece lets us witness a reckoning with authority, order, and dignity. Tinged with a deeper, threatened violence, Notarnicola’s work asks us to consider the rules we create, are forced to follow, and personally resist—to search for that “place where sense is made.”
To hear Christopher read his work, click below:
Steel beneath Your Chin
You let it grow too long, so you might have expected Staff Sergeant to pull you aside after the convoy, this being the third time he had gone out of his way to address the length of your hair, but I bet you never expected him to snag a fistful the way he did when you turned your back and sucked your teeth—grooming regulations are just nonsense rules—all startle-stepped and tight-skinned with that why-me wince as he pulled your gaze to the sun and slid a folding knife from his hip pocket, flicking out the blade, pressing the dull edge to your neck in a smooth draw across your bulging windpipe, a slow hiss slipping from between his gritted teeth, which beamed the way they would beam if you had told the most hilarious joke anyone had ever heard, though none of us mistook Staff Sergeant’s look for a smile, and he asked if you thought his grip on your scalp or the steel beneath your chin might help illuminate the reasons behind grooming regulations, since rules, as he phrased it, made no more sense than noise, like your grunting, like your attempt to cough in the affirmative as Staff Sergeant hooked away the blade, the point of which had scored the soft skin around your throat, leaving a reddened reminder of his message—some rules come from a sensible place—which we all understood all too clearly as he released your hair and shoved you off in avoidance of that place where sense is made.
Christopher Notarnicola is a veteran of the US Marine Corps and an MFA graduate of Florida Atlantic University. His work has been published with American Short Fiction, Bellevue Literary Review, Best American Essays, Chicago Quarterly Review, Epiphany, Image, Southampton Review, and elsewhere. Find him in Pompano Beach, Florida and at christophernotarnicola.com.
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