When I Woke Up The Knife Was Still There

I'd never realised before that a sentence could make up a complete short story.  The genre 'short story' isn't very specific about how long/short the story has to be so I guess it makes sense, but this story made me see the genre in a whole new light:

'When I woke up the knife was still there.'

What I found most interesting, was that the full story and description is there, it's just not r imagination.  A story such as this encourages the reader to make the story their own, to create whatever they want it to be. It's personal. It's meaningful. To me, that's where you expect it to be. Instead of being on the paper, it's in yous what makes it so brilliant.  One other thing that struck me when I first read it, was how quickly myself and my classmates jumped to conclusions, and assumed things that were never actually given to us.  For example:

    All of us immediately saw the character 'I', as a male, who was not the victim himself.  After further thought we realized that the person could be a female, who has been victim to a stabbing and is drifting in and out of consciousness.

    Moreover, we straight away got a sense of danger and tension, however this was only insinuated from the story.  Nothing was ever said about what had taken place, where it was, or the time at which it had taken place, so how do we know for certain that the danger is there?

After roughly 30 minutes of discussion (I also find it amazing how so many ideas and thoughts were provoked in us from so few words) we then began to get onto the subject of metaphors.  What if 'the knife' was a metaphor for something/someone. What if 'the knife' was a nickname for a person? Again, we don't know, we can only guess.

Personally, the first thing that popped into my head was a dark, rainy night on a London street.  The victim, whatever gender they may be, has fallen victim to a stabbing due to gang violence.  No one else had the same idea as me, and that's what I find so amazing about it. Thousands of different ideas have come from these 9 words, yet each of them are so different from each other, and so unique in their own right. All of these assumptions and ideas are all plausible, yet only one of them is right. The 'right' answer is whatever you want it to be.