suresure ni

From a fight scene in an adventure novel:

手のなかで転がしたナイフを、少年の鼻先すれすれに突き立ててみせる。

I'm confused as to what happened with the knife. As I understand it, "suresure" means that it just grazed the indirect object (the tip of the opponent's nose). "Tsukitateru," on the other hand, seems to indicate that it was stuck in the indirect object. I've never come across "suresure" before, so perhaps there's some misunderstanding of the word on my part.

Thank you for any help.

It is true, it sounds contradictory.

Two things I can think of: (1) that the person holding the knife propped it upright right in front of/right close to the boy's nose, or (2) that there was something else that he stabbed the knife into, such as...let's say the boy was standing against the wall, and the person stabbed the knife into the wall right close to the boy's face, as he turned sideways to avoid the knife?

If it is (1), it is a wrong use of the word "tsukitateru, and if it is (2), it's just that the sentence doesn't indicate explicitly what it was stabbed into.

Your understanding of the word "suresure" IS correct. It grazed or not even touched it, but was veeeery close to it :)

Or the writer is not good at Japanese.
Some write such funny Japanese, especially by person/coterie online.