Tensions were high.
Tenison, by definition, usually alluded to a state of elevated drama, but today this suspense seemed as though a new level of dramatic *oomf* had been tentatively poured into a glass and then hurled into oncoming traffic.
‘What if I were to place this knife so far up your arse that you wouldn’t need to chew the next steak you’d bought!?’ spat Greylee as he stalked around his opponent, attempting to identify an opening.
‘I’d say thanks, princess, thanks my lovely, you’ve done me a real favour there. You pillock! What should I’d say, “buy me a drink first!?” Ha, I don’t think that you’re smart enough to find a way to an arsehole even if you had your own pants down in front of a mirror; here’s a hint you’d probably see two of them-’ turning and slashing at the air in a faux attempt to offset the other man, Andy deHands continued to circle around the alley while barking a string of swear words quite unable to be republished in polite media.
‘-are you going to keep dancing in a circle or are we going to actually waltz?’
Letting the older man talk, Greylee continued to watch his folly’s movements.
This Andy was a dust covered tendril of a man, his fetid skin and bone looked as much as they might snap at any instant as they also appeared to be gilded in iron. He was a low rung cretin of pure blooded violence all wrapped up in the unbrushed jaundice of a twice dead daffodil.
Greylee was tense but never scared in these moments, A knife fight was a swarm of openings, a rolling tide of flashes and feints that so often just ended up in someone accidentally stabbing an innocent by-stander. He who catches the handle bears the blade says the veteran, and beyond that he who caught the blade will probably have a rather sore hand.
‘You’re like a kick of undrunk whiskey,’ Andy grumbled, half tripping over his fake stumble and dropping a pile of marbles across the floor, ‘a seminal fluid of abandoned variety that even the lowest of the low would step around. If I found you in a hanky I’d throw the thing away and then burn the bin I put it in.’ Leaning back and pointing his knife at Greylee the old boozehound let out a sonorus belch and coughed up a portion of something black.
Greylee was young, he was smart for a knife fighter, yes, but still young all the same; he felt nothing bad was going to happen to him so long as he kept his mind sharper than his knife. The world had tried time and time again to cut him down but he was always ahead, always just enough out of arms re-
!
Three swift movements unfurled themselves in a flash of steel and fear.
A slash, a parry and then finally a knot of absence fell from the side of one of the knife fighters. Exhaling deeply the fighter recoiled in panic when an intake of breath was met with only a wheeze. Sharp pain began to well from the fighter’s side as a cool damp grew larger and larger; his world fell into a formless blur that he was soon catching up to. Dropping to one knee the fighter looked down to a shoe that was discarded at his feet: a puzzle of memory that consumed his attention and distracted him all the same. Struggling for breath he let his strength fail and fell to the ground, now seeing only that ragged brown shoe he felt so wronged by. A leather boot that once had laces, a damnable piece of footwear that had been long kicked against the gutters and cobblestones of each morning. It was a tired boot that had seen spans of cotton never close enough to fully be called socks.
Slipping it back onto his foot the victor stood proudly. ‘Me old rum would be so proud, anyone got a towel for sunshine?’
…
The kid was thinking too much, people always thought too much, something about the air these days was making people dumb, making them slow: it was why Andy had stopped breathing as much, well, as much as he could. He didn’t know why he was in a knife fight and he wasn’t quite sure how much he’d stand to gain from cutting down a bloke in the street, but there was something about the hollowness of the young lad’s banter that got under Andy’s skin, something lacking about what was supposed to be half the fun of these fights, these ‘tete-a-tetes’ that he kept waking up being involved in.
Dropping his marbles to the floor, deHands had twisted in his shoe as he teetered over sideways, gabbing it, he had lashed outward appearing to be making an attacking lunge. As all young lads do, Greg Lea–or something like that anyway–eagerly parried the shoe expecting that he had just found an opening but, alas, he was seconds away from being proven wrong.
‘And so it goes it does, another chimney sweep gets a whistle in his side and I has to wash me shirt again. You will too of course my boy, but I’d take it to someone that can sew a thread first: no point washing a shirt with a great hole in it!’
J.McCray
2021
Sunday Short Stories 