He was anxious for everyone to go to bed. He washed his hands and cleaned his knife. As much as he loved his family, he cherished his time to himself in the evenings. His wife was an up at the crack of dawn gal and the kids had both apparently inherited her *early birds catch worms* gene, but Frank was a confirmed night owl.

As with most knife aficionados, Frank had mixed opinions about the metals used for knives, high-carbon versus stainless steel. He used high-carbon when hunting because he needed the blade to remain sharp while he was gutting his harvest, let alone when he was skinning it. Stainless just couldn’t keep an edge like that. But high-carbon was a lot of work, needing lots of diligent cleaning to prevent rust. When not hunting, which was most of the time, he went with stainless. The SOG Arcitech that he was cleaning used San Mai VG10 steel and had cost over $300 but was worth every penny.

Cynthia used to gripe about how much he spent on knives but hadn’t complained recently. He was unsure of her motivation for changing that pattern. Maybe she’d come to see how much enjoyment he got out of them or maybe since she’d been spending a lot of their money on her new hobby she’d decided to let bygones be bygones. She’d started trading cryptocurrencies and recently had been buying a lot of one called steam. He had no idea what that was but if it made her happy, allowed him to buy a new blade here and there, and didn’t drain their bank account too much, he was all for it.
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When he’d spent $800 last summer on that gorgeous custom blade he’d found at a knife show down at the Armory, she’d said “Are you sick?” But that had all stopped. Now she was getting into all kinds of steam things he didn’t understand. Steam monsters? Sounded like something out of steampunk novel. And she’d recently brought up the idea of going to Poland of all places for their vacation instead of renting a cabin up north like they usually did. For something called Steam Fest? Might as well humor her though he thought as he cleaned the SOG and pondered what knife to buy next.
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*Written in response to the #freewrite challenges that @mariannewest has been posting.*
This #freewrite was done as three 5-minute writing sessions, each of the three prompts ("He was anxious for everyone to go to bed. He washed his hands and cleaned his knife.", "I was unsure of her motivation for changing that pattern.", and "Are you sick?") being revealed before each of the three writing sessions.

*Pixabay image*