One in a Million
by
A.S. Patric

The 7-Eleven on Punt road, near the Alfred Hospital. A white Mitsubishi Colt with a cannibalised door (same colour, but a different edge guard from another year’s Colt) draws into one of the empty fuelling bays. After three in the morning. Nearing half past. The driver is motionless for a minute within the car’s cabin. Winter, so the night has that dead Melbourne air which would be brought to life by something like snowflakes. As it is, just flat black nothing, like long endless empty roads. The driver gets out of the car and walks around the side of his car spinning his keys around once on his finger — a distracted cowboy. He places the nozzle into the tank and waits, enjoying the smell of petrol. Sometimes it’s as long as five minutes before another car passes along the road. It’s been about as long since an expression passed across his face. Thoughts pass through his head like desolate bullets fired from distant barricades without even the hope of a target. A young man with irrelevant youth. Not even wasted. Just forgotten before it was something to hold onto. Already with his own cannibalised doors. And with nothing in his head he still gets lost in these long middle of the night dreaming minutes. In memories dissolving before registering. That morning already gone… but in the clear light of day he’d taken a walk along tree lined mid-winter streets and felt a leaf fall onto his shoulder. Which in that moment felt like something as rare as being struck by a lightning bolt. The trees naked to their bones. The last leaf of summer. A muffled and meaningless one-in-a-million. The nozzle doesn’t cut off when full. The fluid rushes out and down the side of the white Colt. Splashes across his boots and the bottom of his jeans. He pulls the nozzle out and there’s little more than a slight look of annoyance animating his face. He pours water from the 7-Eleven’s grey plastic watering can to wash away some of the corrosive petrol from his paintwork. Forming petroleum rainbows in the water at his feet. He walks into the 7-Eleven and pays for the fuel with a credit card. The Indian woman working all alone through the night doesn’t say anything to him. He doesn’t say anything to her. He walks back outside to his vehicle and coming around the back end of his car places a foot in the glassy mixture of petrol and water and finds it simply skates out from beneath him and sails out into the air taking his other foot with it. For a moment entirely airborne… his body falls to the hard concrete with barely a sound. He gets up quickly and lightly; gets back into the white Colt with barely an expression on his face. Pain somewhere inside his body but none of it showing.here