Spark

Hank shifted his weight left, then right, his boots squelching in the flooded street. His fists kept clenching and unclenching. Too controlled. Too deliberate. The storm hammered down, soaking him straight through, medals digging into his ribs beneath the coat.

The teenagers watched in silence, phones raised, screens glowing like tiny funeral lights.

Denim-jacket guy stood off to the side with his knife held low, the blade catching flashes of lightning. Not a scare tactic. A tool.

The skull-faced man’s voice cut through the rain.

“I know what you’re thinking, Mr. Malone.”

No gloating. Just a man calmly stating a fact he owned.

“And I would advise heavily against it.”

He rolled his shoulder, brass knuckles gleaming, then began pacing lightly, boots sending up small splashes.

“What you have are two choices,” he said. “Mercifully, yours to make.”

His brass-knuckled hand lifted in a casual gesture.

“Choice number one . . . you take a beating. Hope the knockout comes quick. Wake up sore, concussed, and missing anything worth pawning.”

He spun half a circle, heel flicking water.

“Choice number two . . . you fight back.”

He stopped moving. Everything went still.

“And you will want to. You’ve got history. Reflexes. Muscle-memory.”

He nodded toward Denim-jacket guy. His knife rose a fraction.

“But while you’re doing that, my colleague will make sure you spend your last minutes bleeding into a puddle.”

He stepped closer so the rain rolled off his jaw in clean lines.

“In the dark . . . In the cold.” Then, soft as a psalm. “While this little pack of hyenas records your final breath . . . just to remind you how fucking awful this world really is.”

Hank’s eyes drifted to the knife. Angles. Distance. Timing. If he got to him fast enough. One clean hit. Drop the blade, even the odds. He’d take a cut, maybe worse, but brass knuckles were still better than a gut wound. If he moved right now —

Denim-jacket guy tilted his head. He’d seen the calculation. Read it. He shook his head. Slow. Purposeful. A warning.

“Jugular or subclavian,” he said. “Less than a minute.”

His tone was clinical.

“Brachial or femoral . . . five minutes, if you’re lucky. Radial or popliteal? Ten. But you’ll wish it was quicker.”

He tossed the blade once. Clean spin, perfect catch.

Hank stared. “Huh?”

The skull-faced man smirked behind the ink.

“My colleague is explaining how fast you’ll bleed out,” he said. “Depending on where he cuts you.”

He lifted both hands, mock-innocent.

“Family full of doctors. Didn’t go into the trade himself, but . . . credit where it’s due . . . he keeps them in business.”

The humour sat dead and slick in the air.

Whatever plan Hank had been forming, whatever scraps of courage had started to coil inside him burned out, curled in on itself, and died. He could hardly believe it. How he had come to be standing in the rain, counting down the ways a stranger might end him in front of a cheering teenage audience.

His thoughts began to drift. To fold inward. To Mary. Her slippers. Her cup of tea. That throw blanket she always wrapped around her knees, even in summer. She’d be sitting on the sofa right now, watching the clock, worrying why he wasn’t home. He thought of his chair. Their little living room. The smell of dust and lavender. The remote, always lost in the same place. The comfort of routine. He wanted that more than anything.

And for the first time in his life, he considered throwing a fight. Taking a dive. Just going down. Letting it happen.

He’d never done it. Never even considered it. There were three things The Freight Train had never done, not in all his years, not through blood, bone, or broken ribs.

He’d never taken a dive.

Never been knocked out.

Never lost.

And now, here he was, weighing the least shameful way to break one of those rules.

It would be easy. Just fold. Pretend to black out. Lie still in the puddle, let them take what they wanted, and maybe — just maybe — he’d walk away. Maybe Mary would never even know.

He imagined her hand in his again. Her small fingers curled inside his calloused palm. Her smile when he came through the door, even if it was late. That smile was all he wanted. It was the fastest route back to her.

But something stirred inside him. A twitch. A growl. The thing he kept caged. The part of himself he’d spent years burying beneath decency and restraint and the quiet, aching shame of growing old. It didn’t take dives. It didn’t surrender. And it was starting to pace inside him, restless and wide-eyed, like it knew something was coming.

The skull-faced man reached out and took one of the belts from denim-jacket guy. He slipped it on, letting it hang from his narrow hips like a prop in some strange play. It didn’t fit, not really, but it didn’t look entirely out of place either. Not amid the steel and ink and rain. It was absurd, and yet, somehow — it worked.

Then he turned to the teens. Arms raised. Brass knuckles gleaming, and the crowd responded.

A cheer. A jeer. Wet hands slapping together, voices rising into the downpour.

“Yo, knock out Bigfoot!”

“Yeti Spaghetti!”

The nicknames hit Hank like pebbles thrown at a tombstone.

He looked toward them, toward the glowing phones, the rain-drenched silhouettes laughing behind their hoods. His posture had withered to a slouch, shoulders drawn in, fists half-curled. His eyes searched their faces, but found no empathy. Only hunger. They weren’t people any more. Just predators in hoodies, high on spectacle.

He looked like a dog that had wandered too far from home and couldn’t understand why the world had grown so cruel.

The skull-faced man moved closer. Not with a rush. Not with a lunge. Just one careful, intentional step. He angled his body, positioning himself beside Hank’s hulking frame like a whisper of smoke curling next to a wall. 

Hank could feel the man’s breath, rancid, touched with cigarette tar and something colder, more reptilian. His voice slid out, low and rasping, dragged across sandpaper vocal cords.

“Can you hear that, Mr. Malone?”

The words hit his ear like a secret too personal to be shared.

“That’s the sound of your last fight.”

He paused, savouring the silence, the build-up, the impending ruin.

“I’m going to knock you out. And if you wake up . . . you’ll have nothing. Not even your spark.”

Then everything changed. Before Hank could process the words, before his brain could push through the fog of noise and threat — it came.

A punch — Not a jab. Not a test of range. A hook. Tight. Vicious. Perfectly placed.

It crashed into the side of Hank’s head like a brick thrown through a window. His vision burst with purple stars. His ears rang. The world tilted, not sideways, but inward, collapsing at the edges like a cheap tent giving way in a storm. His brain staggered inside his skull.

Then — another blow. Straight to the face. There was no warning. No wind-up. Just impact. A wet, ugly sound cracked through the street like a hammer smashing into raw meat. Hank didn’t even feel the fist. He felt the after. The jolt of bone. The slap of cartilage. The sudden, sharp sting as blood rushed into his mouth and nose in equal measure.

He tried to think, but there was no room for thought. Just noise. Thunder. Heat. He stumbled back, instinct more than plan. His boot slipped in the puddle, found purchase again. One leg moved. Then the other.

A near-miss punch arched through the air just inches from his face, wide and wild. Had he not moved, it would’ve taken his jaw off. He could feel the ghost of it pass him. The displaced air. The promise of more.

Rain lashed down harder, soaking his wounds, his coat, his thoughts. The cold tried to anchor him. The adrenaline tried to push him. But the pain — the pain — was already winning ground. And still, all he could think was, he said he’d take my spark?

A chorus of boos echoed from the teenagers, not because they cared, but because they were impatient. They wanted action, blood, humiliation. And what they had so far was an old man bleeding quietly into his own collar like someone who’d wandered into the wrong movie.

Hank could taste iron. It coated his tongue with that bitter, metallic sting that brought back locker rooms, split lips, the sting of antiseptic ointment and Vaseline. He lifted a hand to his face. It trembled. His fingertips brushed the edge of his mouth, his nose, somewhere near his eyebrow. Everything felt wet and warm. Too warm. Blood. A lot of it. His shirt collar was soaked through. The rain had become a conveyor belt for his pain, washing blood down the front of his coat in thin pink trails that stretched and spidered into the fabric. It soaked deep into the fibres like a slow infection. There was no way he could hide this. Not from Mary. She’d see it the second he walked through the door. The look in his eyes. She’d know. And what the hell was he going to say? That he lost his job, had no money, pawned what little he had left, and then got his ass handed to him in front of a pack of feral teenagers with smartphones? The thought hollowed him out. And that’s when it stirred again — that thing inside him. The part he never spoke to. The part that had waited quietly for years, crouched deep inside the darkest room of his soul. It didn’t rise with a roar. It stood. Slowly. Like something stretching after a long sleep.

I’m here when you need me, it said. Just that. And it was enough.

But Hank shook his head, quiet and firm. No, he thought. Not like this. He could fight his own battles. He wasn’t ready to open that door. 

Not yet.