It knows what you hate and it hates what you love.

I originally heard about sack of knives in one of my medieval literature texts.

The class had sounded interesting out of my options that quarter, but two weeks in, I was already

wishing I had taken another round of poetry or creative writing. Part of it was the professor,

who was chronically dry and boring, as he gave a can lecture he obviously

regurgitated for the last 20 years.

But most of it was the language itself. It was so archaic and hard to read and I already knew I

sucked at foreign language. Some of the books were modernized but most were

just littered with footnotes in tiny block paragraphs longer than the text they were explaining.

And of course, when I finally saw something that sounded cool,

there were no notes to be found.

It was in the middle of a story fragment about a village that fell under a curse of some kind. People were going crazy maybe, or their cows were all dying.

Hell if I know.

The accompanying woodcut made it look bad though.

Still, it was kind of boring and dumb,

and I was about to give up when a phrase caught my eye. If I wasn't wrong, it read as

Sack of Knives. Like I said, there was no footnote and when I went to the index

the term wasn't listed. I looked on the internet, but there was nothing about it there either.

My interest was already waning, but then an idea occurred to me.

The professor of the class was always telling people to ask if we had any questions,

be it after class or during his student office hours.

No way I was doing that, but maybe if I fired off a quick email asking about it, he would think I gave a

...