Jenna stepped out of the car, the machete in her right hand. It felt heavy in a way gym weights never did. Heavy with potential. Heavy with the knowledge that she could, if she swung it wrong, remove her own shin.
It felt absurd. A contradiction. A machete from a place that sold tap washers and trade packs of caulk. But the results loaded with cold, logistical certainty.
She clicked ‘reserve for collection’ before she could talk herself out of it.
The machete hung at her side, dripping sap.
She drove to the bramble-choked lane behind her rented cottage. The ivy had swallowed the fence. The blackberry canes had reached out like claws across the path to the shed where the fuse box kept tripping. A tree surgeon had quoted £400. She had £47.
Tomorrow, the laurel hedge.
She stopped. The shed door was visible now, grey and listing but there.
The search bar glowed in the grey pre-dawn light of the kitchen. Jenna typed slowly, her thumb hovering over each letter: machete knife screwfix .
She opened the Screwfix app again. Scrolled past the machete listing— 64 reviews, 4.7 stars —and added a pair of thorn-proof gauntlets and a head torch.
Deb tapped a keyboard. “One machete.” No raised eyebrow. No question. Just a barcode scan. It came out in a flat, tamper-proof plastic sleeve. Jenna paid with her debit card, receipt spitting out with a thrrp .
The first cane went clean through. Not a chop—a slice. The steel whispered through the green heart of the thing. She swung again, and again, and within ten minutes she was sweating, grinning, her forearms striped with tiny scratches. The path emerged like a drowned road returning to land.
That night, she wiped the blade with an oily rag and set it on the kitchen table. It looked less like a weapon now. More like a key.