ONE IN A MILLION

It’s winter. 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 endless empty roads.

A white Mitsubishi Colt with a door cannibalised from another year’s model draws into one of the empty fuelling bays. After three in the morning. Nearing half-past. The 7-Eleven on Punt Road, near the Alfred Hospital.

The driver gets out 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. Nothing in his head. He gets lost in these long, middle-of-the-night dreaming minutes. In memories dissolving before registering.

The previous morning is already gone. Almost entirely evaporated. But in the clear light of day he’d taken a walk along tree-lined midwinter 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 the tank is full. 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 fluid from his paintwork. Forming petroleum rainbows in the water at his feet.

He walks into the 7-Eleven and pays 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. Coming around the back end of his car, he places a foot in the glassy mixture of petrol and water and finds it simply skates out from beneath him and sails into the air, taking his other foot with it.

For a moment entirely airborne—his body falls to the hard concrete. Almost noiseless. He springs up quickly, lightly. Getting back into the white Colt with barely an expression on his face. Pain somewhere inside his body but none of it showing.