Stymie Magazine
Spring & Summer 2012
dead rodents in dry wafts of air hitting my shins in intervals. This was Rocky training with the horse carts in a Soviet shanty in the snow. Except in the heat. In a dilapidated three-story school. Without the horse carts. The good thing was, there was no reason to be self-conscious of whatever uncoordinated, wet-spaghetti-armed, even-taller creature I’d grown to be as I’d slapped at the bag for the first time like a spider monkey fluffing a pillow because at the bag right next to mine was the guy with a sasquatch stoop who’d sewn himself a hooded mask and a cape out of bathroom towels, his wide eyes peering through two roughly cut holes, his breath lowly trilling in the little rectangle space of a scissor gash. No one had ever seen him without the hood and cape on. No one had ever heard him speak except to say between snarling draws of breath that he’d made the hood and cape for himself because he sweated more than the normal human being. He might have been the whole reason for the indemnity clause, in fact. Within months, he’d be expelled for all eternity for kicking his sparring partner in the nuts straight out of his corner. But for now, there was a gigantic, hunched man in a homemade terry-towel luchador get-up nailing his bag with rabbit punches, and absolutely none of the other students noticed me. The trainer’s assistant, supposedly the local kickboxing champ in her age group, a teenaged girl with blonde corn-rolls and aviator glasses she had just whipped off with her gauzewrapped hands, did notice me, however, because it was sort of her job to. She started her slumped-shoulder, chin-jutting strut toward me, and I couldn’t help but think how much she looked like my high school bloodshot popeyed bully on her meds. I slowed, took a breath, and was working up a joke about my form before she could beat me to it when she simply stepped in to tweak my posture, push my elbows toward my sides, nudge my fists up to block my face, and angle me against the punching bag. Imagine a kid’s wily scribble going suddenly taut. “That’s better,” she said and then
demonstrated a jab in slow motion, straight from the body, fist turning quick as it thrust out of her arm’s bend in a slight corkscrew, flat side of her fist squared against the bag and digging in and then out. “Think of bringing it right back like it’s on a bungee,” she said. “It’s all about control. That’s where the power is, in the focus, in the control.” “In the eye of the tiger,” I said and snorted a laugh, and she didn’t. She stepped back, signaled with a nod for me to try again. I shook my arms loose for a second and made tough angles of them once more. Straight backed, chin tucked, fists up, standing askew, leading right, my arm powered out, and the thud resonated a little deeper than the monkey smacks had against the bag. “That’s it, you got it,” the girl said. The quick pop of my glove meeting the bag resonated somewhere inside in satisfactory thwaps. In the steady rhythm of it the ache of being out of shape, of breathing in the stale heat of the gym, of being the girl grimacing in the junior high portrait at her own miserable existence, finally slid from the center of my stomach to my limbs and out and gone.
[ 28 ]