Symbolism In Michel Oppenheimer's The Paring Knife

The elephant in the room. We have all been in that situation. No one wants to talk about it. In the short story, The Paring Knife, by Michel Oppenheimer, is about these two couples. The husband finds the knife and remembers the bad memory. The short story shows a lot of symbols, such as the knife, him pushing the dirty dishes away and putting the knife under the refrigerator again.
The knife is something in the past, when the couples look at it, they will remember the first time they fought. "We thought we would make love, but something happened and we had an argument while making love."
"I wanted to rest my arms on the table and then rest my head in my arms, but I felt the dirty dishes on the table and they were in the way." After that