Page 4 of Knife Thrower

“Everybody saw it.”

“And you’d have stayed?”

I shrug. “Depends on the pay.”

He looks me over slowly, the hair scraped back, the flat gaze, the scar on my palm. Then he holds up twenty dollars.

“Stand there. Don’t move. Don’t blink.”

I stand there. He throws four knives past my head, one at a time, close enough that I feel each one part the air. I don’t move. I don’t blink. I hear the blades land, one, two, three, four, and I feel nothing but the hum of the wood.

He walks over slowly and studies me like a man studies a horse he’s afraid to buy.

“Kid, that’s not a gift.”

“What isn’t?” I ask tonelessly.

“Not flinching.” He sheathes the knives in his holster.

His name is Walt Brannigan, and he teaches me the trade. Watch the wrist, never the steel. Breathe on the release. Take the handle, not the edge. Within a month I’m catching blades out of the air with my bare hands, and within a year I’m better at it than he ever was.

Walt dies a couple of years after that, of a stroke, in a Waffle House parking lot.

I keep the vest.

Thirty

“I’m out.”

Danny drops the last knife into the case hard enough to bounce the velvet. We’re behind a stage in Tulsa, in a bar with a fire code violation, and he has been shaking since the second set.

“Out of what?”

“Out of this.” He waves at me, at the target, at the dented wooden board with my outline nicked into it a dozen times over. “You’re leaning in. Every throw. You lean toward it.”

“I’m hitting my marks.”

“You’re hitting them because I’m missing them. I keep pulling wide because if I don’t, you’d just—” He stops. His jaw works. “You’d let me. Wouldn’t you?”

“That’s not how it works.”

“Then how does it work?”

“Timing. Reflexes.” I flex my hand, and the scar pulls tight across my palm. “It’s a skill, Danny.”

“Sloane.” His voice drops low and careful, and I hate it. “You’ve got a death wish.”

“I don’t.”

“Then why don’t you look scared?”

I don’t have an answer for that. I never do. I pick up the case and hand it to him and watch him leave, and I stand in the empty room with the smell of stale beer and spent stage smoke, and my heart rate sits at a steady sixty-two.

I check it against my watch.

The Flyer

The laundromat two blocks from the motel has a corkboard by the folding tables, and I read it while my clothes dry, because reading a corkboard beats thinking.