He has a knife.
I could only stare in mute comprehension. There was a substance-addled tilt to the man’s eyes, his arms and face were wracked by errant twitches, and the front of his dark jumper was already wet with blood. The danger was a simple fact that my brain had already processed.
“Eh, mang.”
The bottle of milk hung from my fingers, its cold handle burning into my numbing nerves. Dull fluorescent light from the buzzing bulb above the petrol bowser strobed across the rusted steel blade. A chef’s knife, decades old, perhaps found in the long grass on the side of the highway.
“Mang, that…you got there. Yo wallet.”
The man came closer. I could see the yellowing of his teeth, could smell the must on his jumper, the sweat on his skin, the iron of blood. The pheromone of ill-intent entered my brain through olfactory receptors already assailed by the stink of gasoline.
“Don’t have a wallet,” I said.
The tweaker narrowed his eyes.
“Yeah, you do. You got a wallet mang.”
“Sorry, man. I don’t. Came with just a fiver.”
It was the god’s-honest truth. I was here on a five-minute, 2AM lazy servo run that I’d made time and time before.
“Fuckin’ liar.”
The man’s eyes flared as he raised the knife.
I was armed with only a single piece of advice that had always played on my mind: don’t fight against a mugger. Give them what they want. But I couldn’t give him what he wanted, because I didn’t have it. All I had were my car keys in my right-hand pocket, and a bottle of milk in my left hand. And he had a knife, and a well-used crack pipe sitting on his coffee table at home.
The man came closer. The knife was within a metre of me when a beast lumbered forth from the dark caverns of my amygdala: ancient, and wise in the ways of violence. A wave of cold adrenaline flowed from my spine throughout my body.
“Okay, I’ll give you the wallet, dude. Just don’t…”
I pretended to fumble in my pocket for the keys, directing his eyes to my upper right leg. Then I swung the bottle of milk at the knife.
Two litres of liquid weighs two kilograms. It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s difficult to stop. The steel knife tip pierced the bottle and slid in almost to the hilt, stuck fast in the grip of the plastic. I twisted the bottle by the handle and raised it, pulling his arm along with it. Milk squirted out in a lazy flat spiral.
The tweaker’s eyes widened in shock. The milk splashed down his arm and ran over his face, blinding him. He yelled and yanked at the knife, but my right hand came out of my pocket holding my keys. The stem and teeth protruded from between my knuckles like a punch-dagger.
The long steel end, mildly serrated, gouged his eye. I pushed hard, felt the tip plunge into the tear duct. He let go of the knife and stumbled backwards. I followed, pressing him up against the bowser. He gripped my forearm, digging in with dirt-encrusted nails, but civilised thought had retreated from my mind, cowering before the primacy of the howling Neanderthal within.
I smashed the half-full milk bottle into the side of the tweaker’s head. The knife came free as the bottle burst, and the steel point clattered off the concrete beside me. I lunged and my fingers found the handle as the tweaker pulled at my shorts, crawling along my body as he reached for the knife. I turned, and chopped the half-dull blade into the meat where his neck met his shoulder.
The tweaker squealed and whimpered, like a rat shot by a pellet gun. Blood spurted straight up from his partially severed carotid artery, drenching the bowser’s digital display. He scrambled backwards, but instinct ruled my mind and demanded that the danger be permanently removed. I forced him onto the ground and rolled on top of his chest. As the tweaker thrashed in my grip, I hurled the knife into the grass.
It was then that I saw the true fear; the man’s terrified realisation that he was about to die and was powerless to stop it. As the blood pooled around him and ran into the drain, I held my grip on his jumper. He weakened as the flow lessened. Desperate movements gave way to reflexive twitches, and finally, stillness. The sound of sirens grew closer, and I allowed myself to let go.
With a backward glance at the damage he had wrought, the primal man stalked off once more to his abode in the wilds of my genetic memory.
© Tropical Writers Inc 2026