How to Win a Knife Fight
Leave the knife in your pocket. It’s only a fist fight until you show the blade. I told this to the boys, my friends, outside of Center Ice. I was twelve, maybe thirteen. Everyone was carrying knives in those days. I probably won’t use it, the boys would say. And I would say, please. Please, don’t.
I wasn’t the only one. For a while, it was a weekly thing we all did. We’d skate around the rink with our arms linked and hobble up the stairs to the food court in our skates and buy slushies that turned our tongues blue, and then somehow or another the boys would puff up their chests and decide to fight and the girls would choose their fighter, and then we’d gather round the boy we chose and he would gently show us his pocket knife, unopened in his palm, looking harmless as a baby hamster, and we would say, please don’t use it, and he would say, I don’t know. No promises. I didn’t know yet that it’s impossible to get a boy to promise at that age. It was a lesson I took too long to learn. I always wanted someone to swear it, hand to heart.
Years later, in my twenties, I was living in New York, spending half my week drinking with people I barely knew. At an outdoor bar in those late, balmy days of spring, I sat at a long table of loose acquaintances and listened to the girl across from me talk about her cotillion. I pictured all those girls, their dresses, their grandmothers’ hands clasped on white tablecloths, painted nails shiny, uniform, unchipped, resting placidly against soft skin, decked in rings more expensive than anything I’d ever owned. The girls escorted by their fathers and then the boys of their choice, or maybe their parents’ choice, or maybe their grandparents’ choice. Well-bred and handsome.
The closest thing my school had to cotillion was when all the girls would pick a boy and beg him not to bring a knife to the fight outside Center Ice, I said. I meant it like a laugh track but got dropped jaw, the faces around me shifting into varied states of confusion and concern. It’s interesting to tell your youth to a shocked audience, to see your life reflected back at you through a ripple of discomfort as it spreads across a crowd. I hadn’t said it for shock factor. I said it because it was funny to me, genuinely funny, and truthful, and because I wasn’t far enough out from my youth to realize no one there would find it relatable. They wouldn’t know they were allowed to laugh.
The Center Ice fights lasted a year, maybe two, before their energy was channeled into other things—drinking, fucking (or trying to). I meant what I said: it wasn’t much different than cotillion. We show-ponied in the skating rink lot, making our debuts. The only difference was that we didn’t hide our ugly sides in public; we wore our violence proudly, like an expensive dress. The boys walked circles around each other and made empty threats. We girls rocked on the curb and screamed please stop, but we only half-meant it. We didn’t have a real sense of fear; we lived too comfortably inside it to feel the sharpness of its edge. I’d pick one boy or another to defend. Sometimes a crush, sometimes a friend’s crush when I was playing backup, playing batting-eye support. I don’t remember anyone ever even throwing a punch, any knives flipped open under the sallow glow of a flickering streetlamp. I remember security chasing the boys off, the dispute left unresolved. Each time I rooted for the fight to never start. I always won.
The truth is, I’ve never cared for things that glint. I only want their shimmer in reverse. Expensive rings pulled off fingers and returned to their case, unbought, unmined, tucked back into the earth. The blade of a Swiss Army knife folded shut, dropped from the hand of a living boy for another day, another week, another girl to save.
Katie Henken Robinson (katiehrob.bsky.social) is a Boston-based writer and the Senior Editor of Nonfiction at Electric Literature. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from Grist, Prism Review, and elsewhere. She was the winner of the 2025 Tennessee Williams Festival Fiction Contest and in 2024, was named a finalist for the Missouri Review Perkoff Prize and the American Literary Review Awards. She is currently at work on a novel and collection of short stories. You can find her at katiehenkenrobinson.com.