II.
RED LIGHT DISTRICT
WINTER

Punhos Sagrados

Rorschach splatters of blood and sweat cover the ring, gray teeth embedded in the canvas by fallen bodies and stomping feet. Light seeps down from a bare bulb over the ring. A ripple spreads through the crowd standing on dented steel benches, rocking on uneven folding chairs. Two glass bottles tumble into the ring. The man in black snatches them up, hurls them back at the crowd. There’s a shatter, then screaming. He shouts that his fights are fair fights, not resigning himself to the role of formality. It’s nice to see someone else believe in hope.

The Indian shakes his arms loose, flexes his fingers, throws his neck left and right with an audible crack. He meets me in the center. He’s probably not even Indian, but from Guatemala, Colombia. Hell, maybe even came up over in the Ghost Town but found “The Indian” on a silk-screened fight poster brought in more bets.

We bring forth our hands, showing there’s nothing but tape and blood, clap lightly. I lean forward. “You up, or you in?”

He runs a hand over the scars crisscrossing his thick forehead, bounces from foot to foot. Another bottle skips across the canvas.

“If you’re up, it’s truly been an honor.” I flex my fingers, feel the tape cup my knuckles. “But if you’re in, you better not fall until I say you’ve had enough.”

He spits a thin stream of brown in an arc, steals a glance toward the ropes.

“You go down before that, I’ll hit you until you see black.”

A flick of the head and he says he’s up.

I take a breath, exhale through my nose, and nod toward the man in his corner, his moneyman, his pimp.

He shakes his head, takes my hand with a tenderness reserved for lovers and men of violence. “It’s been an honor to fight you.”

Then he flattens my nose.

I slide the blade under the tape on my left hand, slice away at the wrapping. Flecks of rust catch on the fabric and I can’t tell metal from blood. I angle the left side of my face down, use the open eye to make sure I don’t slice my arm down the center. The Indian led with his right, getting me to follow him over, then snuck in with a left hook that turned half the warehouse into red splotches shot through with yellow. The skin beneath the wrap is puckered and white. I clench my fingers, work the blood back through them, switch hands and start on my right.

Chicken wire and two-by-fours separate the fighters’ quarters from one another. Wooden planks bolted to salvaged rebar pass for a bench in each plot. Decommissioned meat lockers store our effects. Around the bottom edge of the lockers lies a thin line of crust of something that could be described only as effluvia, and on taking to the street after a fight, we always seem to have a welcome party comprised of hungry dogs. At least we’re afforded quarters here. Hanging on the door handle is a wrench, sized to fit the pipe for drinking water jutting out the floor. Mismatched glasses from the surrounding bars sit atop the lockers.

Caddy-corner to me, a mass of gristle and corn dust held together by overalls rubs the shoulders of a teenage boy. The old man’s corn-husk hair stands at assorted angles. His boy, Ezekiel, has the thick forehead of a veteran, though it’s been hardened by fourteen-hour days on an Outskirts farm rather than time spent ringside. His hands are pointed like shovels and could palm my face like a toy. Still, there’s something immature and undeveloped about his mouth, his nose. Despite being well over two hundred cock-diesel pounds of unadulterated muscle, he has the doe-eyed look of a teenager still looking for approval from Daddy. The title payout would sustain his farm for a healthy nine months, assuming they’re still accepting money out there. He’s got a right that could break down a reinforced door, and though I’d never admit it aloud, every time I see him fight I thank fuck it’s not me in there with him. I believe I could beat him, but am just as glad to never have to prove it.

I swish water around my mouth, spit streaks of blood at the grate in the concrete floor. I press a thumb against my nostril and blow gently, clearing the fluid from my sinuses. Didn’t even see the punch coming.

The Indian shuffles down the gutter between all the corrals. A length of rope keeps his left arm attached to his body, stabilizes the separated shoulder. Black thread crosses between the halves of his split lip. His eyes look washed in motor oil.

I offer him a sip from my glass.

He shakes his head.

“Sorry about your shoulder.”

“Bound to happen someday.”

“If you hadn’t slipped back, I would’ve hit your solar plexus like I was aiming to.”

He gives what seems to be a smile. Blood lines his teeth.

Out in the warehouse, the crowd screams as a fighter enters. Ezekiel pops his shoulders back in the manner of the under-confident and overmatched. His father shouts in his face, slaps his cheeks to get his blood moving.

“Old man should let him focus,” the Indian says.

Ezekiel starts his journey to the ring, swinging his fists in compact hooks and jabs.

“The privilege of youth.” I rip the last bit of wrapping from my hand, rub it into a ball and toss it aside. I pull out a small leather pouch from inside the fridge, unzip it, choose an eighteen-gauge needle. “Give me a hand?”

The Indian flaps his useless limbs.

“Right.” I lean over the grate, stretch the skin around my right eye between my fingers, and insert the needle. The room brightens, depth perception shoring itself as fluid drains.

The Indian comes behind me, lays a hand on my shoulder. “Hope your hands are faster in the next fight.”

I return the blessing, press my fingers against my cheek and listen to the echoing crowd overtake his footsteps.

Tug sits behind his desk picking dried fluid off his denim shirt. The tarnished cross glints in his nest of chest hair. I’ve always thought it was more a prop than a symbol of faith, something to make us trust his bookkeeping. Empty cans of soda, beans, and beer stand like sentinels guarding an invisible fortress. Stuck to the wall with nails is the bracket, crooked lines leading to two lines in the center of the butcher paper. Five bloodied men behind me, three empty spaces between me and fifty thousand. Three men who I’ll use to prove myself to myself.

“You had him down in the third. Why not finish him off?”

I shrug, say he rallied back well.

“You come up against a fighter like Ezekiel, you might reconsider that.” He hands me a towel used to clean engines, points at the spot below his eyes. I feel a warm thread down my cheek, hot tacks in my nose when I inhale. “He only fought back because there was a fight to be had.”

“I’m not going to attack him while he’s on the ground. There’s no point.”

He flutters his hands like meaty butterflies. “Forgot you were the fighting bishop. My apologies, your holiness.”

I start to say that I’m not a bishop, that I haven’t stepped foot inside a church in years except for a hot meal, but I swallow a knot of blood and mucus instead.

“You want gas, grass, or ass?”

“How much in paper?”

Leaning back in his chair, he pops the latch on his briefcase, thumbs through some bills. “I could see you $600.”

“You serious?”

“Honesty is an unprofitable model, son.” He picks at his teeth with a folded bill. “You loosen the belt a notch, start getting wobbly, I might be able to place you some more bets. Hard to win against a man who won’t lose.”

“It suits me fine.”

“Anyway, you can get a little more if you’re looking for something else.”

I tap my fingers on my thigh, quick-counting how much I have for Mona. Six hundred is a pittance after draining my own eye, but it’s closer to getting her well. I hold out my hand, flexing my fingers.

Tug unsheathes bills. “Any of this going to Mister Reiss?”

“If I’m not falling for myself, I’m sure as hell not falling for him.”

“Just checking. Never know what a man does in the shadows.”

“I’ve got a good idea what you do, and I couldn’t say it in mixed company.”

This makes him smile. “You going to buy that Indian a drink with this, feeling so magnanimous like you do?”

Faintly, filtered through his office walls, the crowd downstairs erupts. Doesn’t quite have the rabid timbre of gushing blood. I hope the boy found a good spot to leave that right.

“Nah, heading home.” I peel off a bill, tell him to give it to my corner, then fold the rest in half, shove them in my pocket and sling my bag over my shoulder. “Got a long day tomorrow.”

“Every day’s a long day, Bishop.” His laugh echoes as I’m walking out. “You should learn to enjoy yourself, or start hanging your chin out and let them win some money for once.”

I open the door, start to turn and make a remark about his dick taking a fall, then forget it.

The door shuts behind me. I shrug on my trenchcoat and hobble my way down the steps.

The wind slices through the streets. I cinch my collar with one hand, hold my jacket together with the other. The chilling sweat on my back and thighs makes my skin prickle. My nose begins to numb, and that’s not such a bad thing. Head down, body hunched, I trudge toward my train stop.

Three-story buildings cut a skyline like the bottom jaw of a dog who has bitten too many metal bumpers. Uneven peaks, crumbling valleys. A fire hydrant sits on the corner of Eighth and Holiday, an abstract ice sculpture blooming from the top. The thick bolt is frozen to the sidewalk. Mona would like the lines of the ice, appreciate the organic flow of it. Some things have no choice but to obey their instincts, though she’d explain it as the law of ratios rather than nature. Would’ve explained, rather. Before the attack. Before the miscarriage, the cleaning, the mania. She would’ve compared the soft curve of the ice to the slope between stomach and hip, the spot I’d kiss until she grabbed my hair and pulled me up to her. She’d say that there is a collective feeling that particular curve elicits, then, in her own work, undermine it with a series of violent angles to disorient the viewer. I’d tell her it’s the same as a flurry of rights that pushes the other guy back and finishes with a crescendo of left uppercut. Then she’d kiss my cheek and say I’m funny.

Or something. Maybe I’m only projecting.

Pink light burns through the night, contorted into a grotesque female caricature. The façade throbs with guitars drenched in dust and bathtub whiskey. Slurred shouts and clapping and a few screams of protest. Three buildings tacked over with boards sit next to the show bar, the weak streetlight glancing off watching eyes of the cutthroats, the addicts, and the dispossessed. Pasted up on the boards are half a dozen “Have you seen my child?” posters, each with a sketched rendering of children from three to fifteen. Bookending the squats is a curry house, radiating a saffron glow. Two spits of meat rotate in the front window, though whether it’s leg of lamb, puppy, or engorged rat is even money. I count cracks in the sidewalk, follow the spray-painted arrows. One is a hand-scrawled THIS WAY FOR A GOOD TIME. Another, THIS WAY TO HELL. I continue straight, listening for the rumble of an approaching train.

I follow the overhead tracks past Seventh Avenue, try to avoid the ice. On the corner is the old Municipal Loan Corporation branch, the one where Mona and I tried to get money for some land in the Outskirts where she could have a studio next to a garden. A paper store took over the building after the bank closed down, seizing the opportunity for cheap rent. They figured that with all of the pulping chemicals, no one would notice the scent of boiling ammonia and piles of discarded batteries. They should’ve known that no one would care, that they’re actually contributing to the local economy.

A thin shrill noise rings out, a train’s squeaking brakes but more fragile. I stop in the street, ears turned away from the wind. Bits of ice skip on my ear, melting and dripping inside. I stand, waiting to see if I’m punch-drunk or actually heard something. I lay my hand against the steel girder, checking for vibration, but it’s quiet.

The noise rings out again, this time more guttural and definitely not a train. I start at a trot and try to locate the person. Deeper sounds now, a different person. Around the corner I imagine Mona on the ground, a man holding her purse and pointing while another kicks her; I hear afterbirth dripping, forming a puddle. Glass shatters and my knees scrape pavement. I hoist myself up, wipe my face and kick away the broken bottle, lean down into a full sprint. A thousand frozen knives slash at my face, slip down the back of my trench, nearly to my shorts.

I round the corner and find the old theatre, two men standing over a woman, cornered down to her haunches. The Brick on the right swigs from a bottle, the other one circling closer, a length of pipe in his hand. Her voice rings out again, though it’s not terrified so much as threatening. The man with the pipe circles closer. I slow down, keep to the balls of my feet and stay quiet.

The Brick has a wet laugh, more fat than alcohol. He steps forward and takes a knee to move eye-level with her, and my fist makes a dull thump when it connects with his face. She lashes out at his head when he falls, attacks him with her heels.

The man with the pipe swings around to me. Metal kisses my shoulder and makes my bruises flash bright blue. He goes for the kill shot. I slip back, pepper his chest with two jabs, but he stumbles back and my hook flies past. His elbow catches my drained eye. A light blooms inside my head. I shake it away, throw a haymaker with the vague hope of connecting. He sucks wind as he rears back with the pipe, cueing up to separate my arm at the elbow. I throw my throbbing shoulder forward to shield the blow and he releases a wild scream. He collapses into a writhing pile, the back of his thigh steaming against the frozen sidewalk. Above us: rumbling. The coming train. The girl cups a stained blade in her palm. She says something to him in a language I don’t understand, and her voice gives me the faint vertigo of recognition.

“I’m Marcel—”

“Please don’t tell Sal.” She wipes the knife on my sleeve and scurries across the street. At the exit of the tracks’ stairwell, she flings a leg over the turnstile and throws herself up the stairs.

I stand in the alcove, two moaning men at my feet. The one who had the pipe says he needs to get to the hospital, that he’s going to bleed out.

“You shouldn’t have fucked with her.”

A plastic bag blows past me. The Brick gurgles. I wipe fluid from my eye, step over the bleeding man, and hurry up the tracks.

The train is a memory by the time I get there, the platform bare but for a small fire at the end. Two men huddle around it, gnawing flesh from the bones of some small animal roasting over the flame. A handful of shooting stars pass over the city. I fold myself into a corner, hide behind my collar, and wait for the next carriage.

I can taste the bleach three doors down from our apartment. Rattling my keys in the lock, I clear my throat a dozen times before opening the door. Mona skitters around the living room, as if I set the film of our lives to the wrong speed. Polishing wooden sofa arms. Straightening picture frames. Dusting her sculptures that line the perimeter. Tending to the fig tree in the corner. The reflection off the kitchen tile is near blinding. I unscrew two lightbulbs in the fixture and only with the flicker of light, the electric snap of current change, does she turn to me.

“I don’t have dinner ready yet. I’m sorry.”

“I’m not hungry, sweetheart. It’s fine.” I slough off my trench, hang it on a nail jutting from the wall. “Come sit with me.”

She says just one second and continues to lather oil on the sofa’s arms, buff it with the cloth. She kneels, threads the fabric’s corner between the spindles, pulls it back and forth. When she’s dusting, scrubbing, polishing, scouring, her hands regain their graceful sculptor’s gait. As soon as she comes to rest, her body begins to vibrate at a frequency that nearly creates music.

“How was your day, darling?”

I point at the bruised rainbow beneath my eye, but she’s entranced by the whorls of our hardwood floor. “He had some fight in him, just not enough.”

“That’s wonderful.” She curves her face into a smile. The outside corners of her eyes tremble, skin pulled taut to the point of tearing. “I don’t have dinner yet. I’m sorry.”

I shake my head and tell her I ate at the warehouse. Her sigh is audible relief and she’s consumed by the floor once again. “How are you doing?”

She pauses for a breath, and gives a sadder but more natural version of her smile. “I had a long conversation with Elias today.”

I walk to the kitchen for some water, stepping around wet spots. “And what did he have to say?”

“Oh, he’s not doing so well. I wish I could go by to help him, but there’s so much to do.”

“It’s enough for him to know you care.”

He’s not doing well because he was miscarried years ago. He’s not doing well because his ghost is a black stain on a sidewalk. He’s not doing well because he only exists inside Mona’s cross-wired brain.

She starts to say something but it’s trampled beneath the rattling glass and shaking dishes as the train crosses our window. I down a cup of water before the sediment settles and crimp the wires falling from the wall, shove them back behind the spackle I used to patch the hole when she ripped the phone from its jack four months ago. The train passes and she’s still talking, scrubbing the floor with religious fervor, her foundation cut through with tears. Her shorn fingernail spreads blood over the floor which she scrubs harder which spreads more blood which makes the tears flow faster which makes her hands press harder which makes the blood flow faster, and I lower myself to my knees beside her, wrapping her hand with my shirt, holding her body against mine. The jagged bit of fingernail pokes through the fabric and snags the skin of my stomach. Her breath is hot and smells of sawdust. She twitches, and an elbow clips the bridge of my nose, throwing rainbow sparks against the front of my head. I breathe through my mouth and tighten my grip.

Slowly, I pull us to standing, walk her back to the bedroom. She circles the bed while I pull one of her two pairs of pajamas from the reconditioned dresser and lay them on the mattress for her. I rearrange the dead flowers on her nightstand, straighten the rug and comb out threads to cover the bare spots, push all of the empty metal hangers to one side of the closet. I do anything I can to occupy my hands while she changes, to stave off shame of her scarred and sunken stomach, to look away from what could’ve been to what is always there. She clears her throat and I turn around, peel back the sheet for her to climb under and drape it loosely around her neck. Her skin is dry on my lips and I tell her I love her, turn on a light in the closet.

I close the door and plod through the apartment, stopping for a bag of frozen peas before gathering her sculptures and arranging them to look over the couch.

I pour two fingers of rye then press the vegetables against my face, sip carefully and watch the shapes coalesce on the back of my eyelids. An arm slashes out, blade sparking blue and yellow, cutting through athletic tape, sending slivers of honey and glass through the air. Thin ribbons of song in a foreign tongue seep through the fractures, binding together a skull split in six parts. Two shapes converge on a frail splinter, swarming and swerving until the splinter liquefies and dissipates into darkness.

The man’s jacket hangs on him like borrowed clothing. His right arm curves outward, starting mid-bicep. His elbow appears intact and fully functioning. Wrist and hand, too. The sharper angle in the lower humerus says that particular bet was especially large, the bone completely breaking. The other points were fractures. He must feint with his left, load cards or chips with his right. I don’t recognize his mug, and if he’d trespassed here in the Gurney, both arms and hands would be a jigsaw of bones.

Him and his friend shutting their mouths while I’m trying to listen to the music inside would help, too.

“You know you got open tables in there.” He pulls on a thin cigar, letting smoke drift from his nose. He smells of old chemicals. “Why you trying to make us freeze out here when I could be paying your wages in there?”

I readjust on the stool. “As soon as I get word, you get a seat. Now, kindly shut your mouth.” I lean closer to the entrance, trying to collect every note that slips through the crack between door and frame. Her voice flutters, carries a hint of fragility. It seeps through my skin, winds through my ribs, warms my chest like a mason jar of whiskey.

“Seriously, bud. We’re here for five more minutes, I’m going to find somewhere else. I got tons of places want my money.” He gestures down the street to the few neon signs casting the rest of the parlors in a garish light. Show clubs keep with neon, figuring they’re following some kind of tradition. The light attracts attention, anyway, giving their girls more pockets to supplement the pole’s tips. The parlors, though, we keep it low-key. We need asses in chairs and wallets in our coffers, but we can’t let in any punter from the alley.

The torch singer throws herself into the refrain, straining her voice to the point of crumbling, pushing us to the edge of a building, daring us to take that step then pulling us back, weaving a slight lilt into the outro to coddle us, brush back our hair, smell her sweet breath. I peek around the doorframe, watch her gyrate and throb, her wrists pressed to glassine cheeks. The guitar player tosses his head back, unleashing a baritone harmony.

The man with the bent arm says something to his friend, but I lose it in the wind. I turn toward him, stare. He drops his shoulders, straightens his spine. Starts to step forward, but just raises his foot and lowers it.

“Go or stay.” I slip off my stool, stand before him. “But shut your mouth while the lady is singing.”

He steps forward now, saying, “You need me. You need my grip.”

“I don’t need a fucking thing from you and your feral friend there. You want to shut up, or you want to leave?”

He smacks his friend on the arm, knocking him two steps sideways. “Buddy boy here thinks he’s a hard case, thinks he can command people because he’s got a fancy stool.” His left hand reflects the lights. I clock a blade in his palm. “He thinks we jump on his say-so.” The man looks to me. “That how it is, buddy boy?”

“You’re nothing but a little bird with a broken wing.”

He flashes his knife. I duck back, catch it on my shoulder. I lay into his cheek and the crush of bone is audible. He lurches back, screaming through the fluid collecting in his throat. His friend catches him, shoves him back at me. I jab a quick left to his jaw, follow up to his gut with a hard right. He sits, swiveling. Blood flows over his chin, collecting on his jacket. Metal clatters on the pavement. I fold up his blade and slip it back into his pocket, his friend standing and staring and scratching his wrists, avoiding eye contact.

The door opens behind us, Sal’s voice preceding his body. A stumpy fat man keeps alongside him, squat legs moving twice as fast to keep up. The fur ringing Sal’s collar waffles in the winter breeze.

“Yeah, he can do it like that,” Sal says. “But make sure he knows he’ll end up with the hogs.”

The fat man says he’ll pass it on, then lowers his head to the wind and totters down the street.

Sal looks at the baby bird with the broken face, turns to me and says to come close. He leads me to the door, points a crooked finger to the last of three tables along the wall. Daymo, one of our dealers, slides cards across the wooden table to three gray men and a woman with a face to match her beaten leather purse. “That one on the right, with the hawk nose? He stays here till I get back.”

The sound of wood snapping. A heavy grunt. I clench my fists. Down the street, in front of the old Ritz, the fat man rocks himself off a pile of scorched and discarded boards, keeps moving down the street.

“No problem, boss. The man stays.” I don’t particularly care to know what he’s done. It’s easier if I make him stay.

“He tries to walk, you shatter his kneecaps.”

I nod. Sal starts to walk away then pauses and points at the man on the ground.

“Throw him in the dumpster or something, yeah? Son of a bitch’ll freeze over the sidewalk.”

The night passes in fits and starts. The broken bird and his friend scatter after Sal’s cleaning orders. Two girls from Norma Jean’s come in giggling, leave crying. I sit hunched on the stool for twenty minutes, letting globs of saliva fall to the sidewalk, wagering internal bets on how long they’ll take to freeze over. I count the stars—comets, maybe? asteroids?—sprinting through the sky, lose count after an hour, start over. My hands ache no matter how much I breathe into them.

Sal returns a couple hours later with a lightness to his gait and flecks of blood on his cuffs. I nod to him, relay that hawk bill’s still leaking money. He pats my shoulder, then glances down to where my hands should be and hands me his coffee cup, heads inside with a smirk. Barely lukewarm, but it helps. I sniff it and catch some brandy. All the while, the singer lays her soul to waste over the parlor floor, the cadence and tone of her voice filling my head with visions of tan hills tinted with scrub brush, olive groves twisting their way through salty air, leading a path to a pale blue ocean. A street girl calls out and reduces the scene to compost. She asks if I feel lucky. Her underbite makes her slurp when she speaks.

The parlor begins to quiet as the night sky pales to gray. The baby bird’s puddle has frozen in a wine-colored sheen. I bring the stool inside so it won’t end up kindling in an oil drum blaze.

Sal sits at a corner table, thumbing through stacks of bills. A bottle of brown liquor at his right hand, sheathed switchblade at his left, he oscillates between cartoon gangster and carnivore. Next to a table, the torch singer cocks a hip. Her hands float along the shoulder of a gambler’s jacket, a finger slipping through the hole in the burlap. Daymo calls his bet, and as the gambler tosses down his chips, to show her he’s worthy to share a bed with, she presses her skin to his back and filches a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. Daymo calls the bluff and the gambler slides his chair back, leg catching on the knothole in the wood-plank floor. He looks to the space where she was, sees her now chatting with the guitar player, smoking a stolen cigarette.

I sink into a chair across from Sal.

“Only a couple more till you’re the big one. How you feeling for this next guy?”

“Two to get to the big one.” The winner gets fifty grand. The rest? Nothing. “Three to be the big one.”

“Who’s counting?” He pauses his tally, sips at his brandy, continues. “What is he, Mexican? Thai? One of those Spanish countries.”

“Brown doesn’t mean Spanish.”

“How much do I want to put on you, is my question.”

“He’s got an anvil head, but tries to be too nimble. I keep him back with stingers, he’ll tire out by the fourth or so. Two kisses on the chin and he’s breathing in canvas.”

“That quick?”

I wave my hand at the cocktail waitress, ask for water. The crescent of her left ass cheek sinks below her skirt when she turns, displaying a rupture of blue veins. “You know anything about physics? How much energy you think it takes to move that lug around?”

“Have you seen that right, though?”

“Yeah, it’s frightening. But he’ll never get a chance to use it.”

“So you’re saying you’re confident.”

I start to reply but he clears his throat, calls out, “Carissa,” and motions her to come over. The singer meanders over, stands behind me. I smell her sandalwood perfume. I don’t look up, and I can feel her not looking down at me.

He asks her for a cigarette and a slender wrist offers the pack.

Carissa.

I’ve been coasting on the warm current of her voice for two months and never knew her name. He lights the cigarette and focuses on me again.

“That’s all?” she says.

He flips his hand to dismiss her. She says something in a tongue I don’t understand and when she’s gone he gives a hard smile. “Go on.”

“What I’m saying is, the real question here is how much do you want to win?”

This brings a laugh. He slides a thin stack of pre-counted bills in front of me. “There’s some extra in there for those boneheads last week. You did good keeping them out.”

I slip the money into my pocket, say, “Appreciate it, Sal.”

“I aim to please.” He rifles off a half-inch of bills, lays it between us, and leans back, arms crossed over his chest. The waitress drops my water before me, splashing over onto the table. “So you’re saying you’re confident?”

“I’m saying I’ll win.”

He swirls brandy inside the cracked glass, nodding to some rhythm pulsing in the dark matter of his skull. A beetle crawls across the table, iridescent wings twitching. “How’s Mona doing these days?”

My teeth click on the glass, I try not to bite it off. “I won’t lose.”

“It’s all relative, you know?” He nudges the stack.

“We’re fine.” I lay my hands palm down on the table, away from the money.

With a single motion, he flicks open the knife and sinks it through the middle of the beetle’s shell. The beetle kicks its legs, death throes.

“He’ll go down before the fifth.” I stand up, keep my hands steady, leave the stack next to the dying beetle. “That’s all I’ll give you.”

Turning toward the door, I button my trench and shove my hands deep into the pockets. I catch Carissa watching me watching her. I cross the street, duck into the blacked-out windows of Mom’s Bar for a rye, waiting for my heart to stop throbbing.

No amount of rye can make the television tolerable, definitely not while Arthur fucking Reiss blathers on about the City’s economy, how now is the best time to invest in the future and have confidence in your leaders, while his lapdog lurks in the unfocused background. Still trying to convince the population there’s a future in cash, more to keep his safe weighted down than for any notion of social stability. There’s a bright blooming sun in the background, though, so this must be rebroadcasted. Still.

I drop a few bills for the drink and tip, eyeball my already-thin roll, take two bills back and leave. I yawn into my fist and start toward the train. My heels click down an eerily quiet street, the neon and breaking sky casting the same obscene hue over the city.

Around the corner, I spot a silhouette twenty feet in front of me. Faint music in the air. Its left leg pivots beneath a slight frame, a heavy black bag counterbalancing on the right shoulder. My legs carry me closer, and I realize the music is humming. The tone is familiar and I step quicker for a half a block, trying not to sound threatening, however I can do that. Tiny fists at the end of her jacket sleeves.

“Hey,” I call out.

She continues, leg twisting, fists flexing. I call out again.

“I work at the Gurney. With you.”

She stops and spins, blade glinting in her hand. Relief covers her face like a cloud. “Why didn’t you say that before so I wasn’t hauling ass for the last two blocks?”

I want to tell her that I’ve watched her from afar for months, that her voice is the thing that gets me through the night. Instead, I shrug.

She hooks her chin down the street. “Come on. I’m going to miss my train.”

I offer to take her bag, but she swats away my help, white-knuckles the handle. Her whole torso shifts with each step, as if her body were built on a fault line. The way she contorts herself when performing, I’d assumed it was passion, not dilapidation.

“Which stop are you?” she says.

“Up north to Adams. I train over that way.”

“Ballet?”

“Boxing.” And I don’t catch her smirk until after I answer.

“Shame.”

“You’re not a fan of boxing?”

“No,” she says. “You’d make a beautiful ballerina.”

Two cars speed down the street past us, the brown sedan swerving, exhaust pipe sparking, the driver either drunk or poorly evading. The Cutlass behind keeps a steady bead on the bumper, probably waiting for the sedan’s driver to make a mistake and kill himself. The gust of wind when they pass tears a poster from the lamppost and makes it tumble down the street. As quickly as the cars arrived, they disappear.

She pauses, lights a cigarette. “Thanks for not saying anything to Sal.”

“What was all that?”

Breath and smoke clouding her face, she says, “Bullies,” and the flat way she responds doesn’t make me ask for clarification.

A radio car cruises by, weak lights seeping reds and blues on us, engine whining like a mule with a full cart and broken legs.

“So what are you singing about, anyway?” I stammer as I ask the question, visions of a weeping Mona in my head. “You sound very intense, is what I mean.”

“Stories,” she says. “Mothers, lovers, leavers. Whatever people sing about.”

“I couldn’t understand any of it.”

“Você não fala português?” she says. “It’s fado.”

“Oh.”

“It’s old.”

“Right.”

“Most are songs I learned growing up. Some are pop songs, translated. One or two I make up as I go along, singing about the crowd, what they look like.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look around that place. There are so many degenerates, losers, fuck-ups.” She pulls hard on her cigarette. “But they really commit themselves to it. Before Sal breaks their arms, at least. There’s something romantic about that.”

“That they squander their lives on rigged games and watered-down booze?”

She smiles at me. “They’re all rigged, really. Anyway, I think it’s sweet and it keeps me entertained for an evening.”

“Sweet.”

“Yeah. Sweet. What about you? Stripping down to your undies and beating the fuck out of people, schlepping to the gym at six in the morning when you should be cuddled up next to your sweetie.”

“How do you know—”

She touches my hand. “A ring is a good start.”

“Boxing is sweet, I think.”

“Now you’re making fun of me.”

“A little.” I look around and realize we’re standing on the train platform. At the far end, a lump of human is curled near the edge, not moving. Rats screech down on the tracks.

“So why do you do it?”

“Guess for the same reason you sing.”

“Because it’s a way out of here?”

I picture Mona scrubbing our floor to splinters, polishing the counter reflective. “Metaphorically speaking, yes. I enjoy it, too.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

A blast of stars before me. I stumble back, cup my nose, smell static in the air. When I blink away the spots, she’s shaking her right hand.

“You’ve got a brick face,” she says.

“What the fuck was that?”

“I thought you liked getting punched.”

“That’s not really what I meant.”

“Good thing I’m a girl then.”

I feel my nose with the pads of my fingers. Not broken. “Don’t hit like one.”

The tracks vibrate, brakes squeal and scatter rats as the train arrives. The doors unlock with a pneumatic hiss and I wedge a hand in, pry them apart and let her enter first. We sit in the first row. Our voices echo in the empty carriage.

“I can control it, in there.” I gesture to an amorphous infinity, at the neighborhoods we dodge through. The houses boarded and lit with kerosene lamps. The tin sheets propped up with charred building remains. The crumbling buildings and neon signs. “In the ring.”

“The other guy can knock you out, can’t he?”

I allow a small smile. “He can try.”

“So you’re good.”

“You go out there,” I say, pointing out the window, “and who knows what’s waiting. In the ring, I know what happens. I make it happen.”

“So you’re a control freak.”

I loosen my collar, square my chest with her. “What happens inside the ring, whether you win or lose, it’s all dependent on yourself. If you’re bloodied, maimed, or if you get killed, it all falls back on you.” I nod at a passing building, smoke tumbling from the roof, the windows. “That’s more than any of them can say.”

Some fat motherfucker borrowed my stool and apparently has no understanding of the sitting process. The legs are uneven and wobbly. I hook my feet around the bottom rung, cross my arms to get comfortable, falling back into yesterday’s subway ride, tracing the contours of her chin, cheeks, then the damn stool tips forward. Not enough to fall, but it upsets my equilibrium and I end up throwing my arms sideways, gasping in surprise.

How the fuck am I supposed to bounce a gambling parlor when I look like an epileptic pigeon?

A guttural laugh shuffles up the street. A handful of bills land next to my feet.

“I got twenty on the chair.”

I look up. “Fuck you, Fancy.”

“Double down if you’re feeling right.”

“It’s a stool, not a chair.”

His drainpan forehead wrinkles as his laugh whistles through his collection of teeth. He bends down and snatches up the money, his fingers like sausages, knuckles like chunks of rock.

Back in the day, he was Fancy Clancy, named on account of his dexterous footwork. He could nearly get a brawler to knock himself out just by dancing around him. His left stunned the other pug, not so much with power but because he was so fast the other guy only saw Fancy’s shoulder twitch, then white dots. Though he could meter it out for days, the man was not built to absorb punishment, as evinced by his disfigured mug. Removing himself from the canvas wasn’t as easy as he’d thought it would be, and he traded one vice for the next. Now he runs minor errands for Sal in exchange for some walking around money, which he promptly gives back to Sal via Daymo.

“Got to learn to keep your right up,” he says.

“Someone broke my stool.”

“Nah.” He smacks the side of my head and my right eye goes blue with pain. I nearly fall off the stool but he pushes me back up. “Won’t get swole like that if you protect yourself. Lucky you haven’t run into someone like old Ezekiel. He’ll make you learn quick.” He raises his hands, scuffles back and forth in an arthritic version of his former self. His jab is still surprisingly quick and he tags me twice on the opposite side of my head to prove his point.

“Keep myself covered. I get it, you old bastard.”

He coughs into the crook of his elbow, chest rattling and eyes threaded through with red lines. He lobs a thick ball of green and brown mucus onto the sidewalk and pounds his fist on his chest. He straightens himself and dips his head when he catches sight of Carissa.

“Beg your pardon, miss.”

She arches an eyebrow, unaware, and squints as she sets a bead on my face.

“I’m not much of a fan, but you’re supposed to stay out of the other guy’s way, yeah? Not jump in front of his glove?”

Fancy pipes up, “I told him the same thing, miss. Doesn’t listen to me either.”

I ignore him, tell her it was only sparring. “Maybe you two should be in my corner tomorrow night so I don’t fuck it up. What do you say to that?”

He looks side to side, down to where his watch would be if he hadn’t already sold it. “Nah, think I got some things planned I’ve got to attend to.”

She digs into her woven purse, different from the black leather bag she hauled around the other day, and pulls out a small tin. “Grandmother’s secret.”

I unscrew the lid and am hit by the smell of chamomile and antifreeze with campfire undertones. I press the lid down again and she snatches it from my hands.

“Come here, you big baby.” She presses her fingertips into the salve and spreads a thin layer over the swollen part of my face. Her touch lingers even after the salve is absorbed. She examines my features, her tan lips pursed, but never looks directly at me. Cataloguing, memorizing. I hope I’m not projecting again. “Bruising is just collected blood. This will disperse that blood, move the fluid away to get rid of the swelling.”

I say thank you, but it might only be in my head. The spot where she applied the salve burns, hot needles stabbing the skin.

“There,” she says, her hand traipsing my jaw, fingertips glancing off my chin. “Give it a few minutes to work.”

I nod, and she enters the Gurney.

“I don’t know about you, but I got myself a nice hard-on.”

I’d forgotten Fancy was standing there. I shake my head and tell him to go inside. He opens the door and an old man tumbles out. He lands on his right hand, which folds beneath his torso. He rolls, screams reverberating in the street.

“Fucking cheaters,” a voice inside yells.

“Ain’t they all?” Fancy says, stepping through the door.

The old man sniffs back a few tears and his good hand cups the mangled one, fingers black and red and jutting at assorted angles. The hand itself hangs only by skin, flopping back and forth. I can feel bone grinding against bone, the ball joint mashing against carpals. I broke my wrist on a man’s face once—I’d been in a hurry taping up, and he lowered his head when I swung, compressing all my bones with a single snap—and I know that old man feels knives up and down his arm with every movement.

I kneel down next to him, scoop my arm under his shoulders. My cheek is now freezing where it had been on fire. In my head I see black frostbite spreading, chunks of my face falling off and shattering on the street. “Come on, old timer. Got to get moving.”

Smudged across his face are liver spots like thumbprints dipped in oil. Tears cut lines through dusty cheeks. “What am I going to do?”

I heft him to his feet. “Don’t know. But I wouldn’t stay here.”

“They took my money. I’ve got nowhere to go.”

I nudge his back, moving him along the pavement. “Don’t make bets your bones can’t back.”

He shuffles toward Mom’s Bar. Mom’s standing in the doorway, butcher’s arms crossed and chewing on a cigarette, and she gives him such a severe look that he veers away, head down. He makes his way down the block, cradling his wrist like a ruined kitten, the showgirls catcalling even so. When he gets to the corner, he disappears into Apollo’s. Poor man’ll be lucky to get out with all his organs. I catch Mom’s eye, say what can you do. She crushes her smoke under her heel and heads inside.

I climb back onto my school, catch a glimpse of my reflection in the glass. I press my fingers to my cheek and feel no swelling. The bruise has evaporated.

Three syringes of Avitene, a perfume bottle of 1:1000, and a knot of gauze go into my bag, along with an extra shirt and two rolls of tape. The last thing I need is a cutman saying he forgot his supplies at home, or being paid to forget. For a moment I waver, then throw in an identification card, my grandfather’s army watch, and a solid gold cross my mother got from her mother who got it from her mother when they immigrated. This man’s right is frightening, and I won’t lie in hospital purgatory with a hematoma blooming inside my head because I don’t have the right things to trade.

I stand shirtless before our bedroom mirror wearing boots and jeans, throwing slow-motion combinations. Jab-cross-cross. Jab-jab-right hook. He’s wearing down, keep him moving. Jab-jab-cross-left hook-right uppercut. He’s tottering, watch him wobble. Swerving toward you, haymakers flying. Slip right, block left. Jab-jab-left hook-left hook-right overhand and his face is a downward smear, his knees water and ash, his brain stem a twisted mass of nerve endings all firing at once. The crowd screams, bottles flying at his limp form, the ref dragging him by the ankles, pausing, grabbing a cornerman to take an arm and help.

All the while I stand in the corner, staring. Waiting. Waiting for the envelope of crumpled bills in Tug’s top drawer. Waiting for the next man to fall, and the next, until the final one. Waiting for the shining summer afternoon when I take the train to the Outskirts and thumb a ride to the Plantation. Waiting for the moment when their wrought-iron gates part and Mona strolls down the driveway, cherry blossoms in her chestnut hair, and sets her suitcase next to my feet. Waiting for her to take my collar in her slender sculptor’s hands, pull me forward and whisper, “Thank you for waiting.”

I pull on my shirt and coat, grab my bag. Even when I’m in the bedroom, I can hear squeaking in the kitchen. I take two long breaths before leaving the dark hallway and stepping into the kitchen.

Mona’s craned over the counter, wiping and spraying and scouring and sweating. Her elbow seems to rotate like a praying mantis’s head, achieving new levels in cleanliness with every obtuse angle. The rag is a blur of yellow, nearly the same color as when we bought it six months ago. If the ammonia and lemon juice didn’t leave a hint of residue, it would be exactly the same.

It takes three throat clears for her to acknowledge me. She spins quickly, hands over her chest.

“You look nice.”

I assess my jeans and boots, the trench with a slash in the shoulder. I curve my lips upward, say thank you. “Did you do something with your hair?” I step toward her, cupping the inward swooping curve on the left side of her head.

“I curled it this morning.” The right side lies straight, as if fresh from the shower. There are white streaks in parts, started more than three months ago, but we’re both on the diminishing side of child-bearing age. As if that could even happen again.

Her hand in mine, I press my lips to her tender knuckles. I can feel her sharp inhalations, the tension in her forearm. “You look beautiful.”

She bites back a smile, waves the rag as if to say, oh, go on.

“I’ve got a big fight tonight.” I’m looking down at the scuffed toes of my boots without realizing it. I don’t know if it’s unconsciously bashful or ashamed, don’t know if I want to know. “Think I could show you off?”

“Oh,” she says, turning back to the counter, hand moving in circles before she’s even there. “Oh, I don’t know. There’s the floor and the fig and—”

“It’s fine, sweetheart.” I touch her hand and tell her I love her, I’ll see her this evening.

As I walk out the door, I scuff my boot along the floor so she’ll actually have something to clean.

A locust pings off the bulb above the ring. The Anvil beats his wrapped fists together, a cloud of powder exploding from the tape. I hope to fuck that’s talcum. Looks too light to be lye, but with the line of tweakers half-mooning his corner, who knows. Might’ve accidentally found a way to reconstitute the dead while trying to get high and dried out the corpse before throwing it on a piece of tinfoil.

We meet under the light. The ref recites his edict. I tip my head up to get a bead on him.

“You up, or you in?”

He grins at me. Five teeth glisten. “The fuck you think?”

“One can never tell.”

He leans down, nose a quarter inch from mine. His breath smells of sour cream, old meat, and charcoal. “I’m going to fuck you like your dad used to.”

I swallow, flex my fingers. “That’s good to know.”

And I rear back, twist hard through my hip and sink my right into his eye socket. Something squishes against my finger.

He stumbles back, shakes his head like a dog drying itself, blood flying off. He charges me with pumping arms. I slip the punch, keep moving, distance him with my left, and wait for him to open up before throwing my right. His chest thumps, absorbs the brunt of my punch, and he counters with a left that opens the side of my face.

I slash at my eye, wiping back blood. I jab twice to back him up and he uncorks a right.

The crowd whooshes through a tunnel, chasing me. I taste metal and hear a faint clap of thunder. Roll over, see the ref’s hands by my head. Six, he says. Seven. I roll to my belly and press my knuckles into the canvas, do a push up, bring my feet beneath me. My legs bow under the weight of my body, straighten with a snap. He asks if I can go on, and I duck as his face splits, a tooth sent flying across the canvas. Though nigh on deadly, the Anvil’s hook is far from accurate. I step over the fallen ref, dodge two jabs.

We parry punches for a minute, both trying to get our legs under us. Just before the bell rings, he goes for a kill shot and leaves his jaw hanging open. I connect at the top of his mandible and send him reeling.

My cutman throws water at me, presses a burlap cloth against my face. I imagine it’s yellow and smells of ammonia. I imagine I can see a rusted outline of my face on our counter. He stings my temple with adrenaline, presses more gauze around it to soak up the moisture before applying Avitene.

“Might want to stay away from that side,” he says. “Likely to split you, he gets near.”

“Yeah, like my daddy.”

The gauze loosens for a second. “What?”

“Nothing.”

The ref shifts his jaw back and forth then rings the bell. Cutman hoists me up. “Good luck.”

The Anvil comes to the center, fists resting at his thigh. “Come on. Come on, let’s see it.”

I keep my fists up, elbows in, hear Fancy goading me. Feint right and he’s slow on the draw. Still, his hands stay. Another feint left. He bucks right and I land a cross on his forehead. Wrist presses into carpal compresses into knuckle. Tingling fingertips. I make a claw and they’re still mobile. His left eye is slightly crossed.

I close in, lay a jab-right hook-left hook on him, and as he tips forward, I catch the scent of sweetness. Step back, hands mid-chest. He smiles and pops a quick combo. His fists slice the light into hundreds of tiny shards. His fists are dwarf stars turned supernova on my face. His fists are covered in sap, dipped in glass.

Blood curtains. I throw my head back and forth. The ring clears, goes red. Glimpses of him, an electric field of violence more than a visual person. I strafe right, throw a jab to keep him back, keep circling, wanting to stop and concentrate, will the bell to ring. Fling away the blood in time to see his left on a bead toward my face. Arcing away, he still grazes my cheek.

The Anvil’s hung out, extended, and my right hurtles up past my torso, notching in between his Adam’s apple and jaw. Under the muted shouts of the crowd I hear a pop. His eyes bulge, break red. His knees disappear and he collapses, glass knuckles slicing the canvas as he lands.

I hurry over to the cutman, who presses towels against my face. “He still down?”

“For now.”

When the blood is cleared away, and the Anvil is erecting himself piece by piece, I walk over, stand above him. “Should’ve said you were up.”

He says something that’s lost in bursts of red. I drop down and unleash a right, splitting the side of his face from temple to nose. His head hits the canvas and bounces, a halo of blood radiating. The crowd erupts. I wipe my face and retreat to the fighters’ quarters.

“Lord Almighty.” Fancy takes a heavy drag from his cigarillo and exhales into the night air. “I’ve seen some cattle coming out of their house look better than that man.”

“If he would’ve fought fair, there’d be no problem.”

“Can’t say you look a whole hell of a lot better, though.” He exhales a smoke ring, pokes a finger through it. “Still. Man isn’t going to eat right for a couple moons.”

I lean back on my stool. Though I can’t be positive, I think Sal heard me complain about the stool and had one of his lackeys fix it. There’s no rocking, and the wood itself feels smoother.

Carissa makes her way up the street. She holds the small purse slightly away from her body, trying to minimize the effect of pivoting. I wonder if it’s pride or a safety measure. If those two from the other night were any indication, though, I pray for anyone who decides to fuck with her.

While she’s rooting around in her bag, she gives me an easy smile that can only come from some hidden place inside her chest. Her palm holds the small tin of salve. “I thought you’d need this after what he did to you.” She motions around her entire face, meaning mine, then lays a cool hand on my cheek, leaves it there long enough to thaw my chest before heading inside.

I stare at the tin in my hand.

A low whistle. Fancy smiles that goddamned smile, rocks on his heels.

“What?”

“Didn’t say nothing.”

“Fuck you, Clancy.”

He holds his arms up, gives me something like jazz hands, sings, “I’m just a soul whose intentions are good.”

His laugh echoes behind him. He tosses his scarf over his shoulder like an old fighter pilot, strolls over to Mom’s, disappears inside. I press my fingers into the tin and spread the salve over my face. I slip the tin into my breast pocket, cross my arms, lean against the wall, and concentrate on the warmth rolling up my face.

The sky separates in slashes of pink and orange, morning exhuming itself from night. The tea and brandy is now cold in my cup. I’m not sure if Sal is trying to stay in my good graces with the hopes of convincing me to dive, watching out for his investment and investment’s hands, or slowly poisoning me. Each is as equally viable as the next, and I don’t care to know which it is.

As the streets begin to wake, Carissa steps from the door, knee-length pea coat swishing as she moves. She’s got her black bag now, and I didn’t notice her bring it in.

“You look better,” she says.

I raise my cup to her.

“Fancy a drink?”

I look at my watch, though I know damn well what time it is and that I should be going home to sleep and see Mona for a while before heading to the gym and then back to the Gurney for my shift, but hear myself say I would before I know I’m saying it.

“Mom’s?” she says. I shake my head, point to some arbitrary point farther down, and we set off. Her twisting lope keeps me from moving too fast. A number of watering holes and show bars reel through my head, but I can’t decide on a particular one. Not one I frequent, but one where I know we won’t get butchered. We come to a wooden-plank door reinforced with rust-pocked iron bands, and I open it and usher her inside.

An animatronic racetrack with die-cut metal dogs rings the ceiling. Dust hangs in the air and the stools have crescent moons cut in the seats. I pull one out and offer to take her bag. She hangs it on a nail beneath the bar.

“What are you having?”

“A good Beaujolais, not too fruity, not too dry.” She twists her fingers around her chin.

“This isn’t quite—”

“Loosen your panties.” Her knuckles sting my shoulder. “Whatever you’re having.”

I ask the woman behind the bar for two ryes. The jukebox starts playing an old country song. I remember the melody, but not the words.

“That guy was pretty massive.”

I look over the place. Two humps in the corner, tossing match-sticks and homemade cards back and forth. A bored streetgirl at the next table, smoking a thin cigarette while watching the card players. Chained up in the corner, a TV broadcasting a story about two more kids gone missing. Must be fifteen in the last month. A waif of a little girl runs slalom between the tables. She’s maybe four or five years old, with a tattered dress and skin discolored by olive and black splotches. No one acknowledges her.

“The guy you just fought,” she says.

“Right.” Blood rushes through my face. “Yeah, he was.”

“Why didn’t you knock him out in the first part?”

“Shit, did it look like I wasn’t trying? The guy was made of clay and rubble. I’d hit him and he’d absorb it, reform.”

The bar matron clomps over to us, both glasses cupped in her right hand, the empty left sleeve of her shirt pinned to the body. She stares through grease-smeared lenses. “How you paying?”

“Cash?” I say.

The bar matron grunts, says twenty. I pull a few bills from my pocket, thumb a few coins for a tip. She plods away.

We clink glasses. “I thought you weren’t interested in boxing.”

“I never said that.”

I sip my rye. “It was implied.”

“Then I guess you weren’t paying very close attention.”

If only you knew, sparrow.

“I asked around, heard good things about you,” she says. “Colored me curious.”

I lean back, surveying, ask what kind of things she heard. She sips her drink to hide what I believe to be a smile.

A tug on my leg. The discolored girl holds out her empty palm. Olive and charcoal splotches dot her milky skin.

“I don’t see anything there, sweetheart.” I glance at Carissa, for some reason.

The girl presses a finger into her palm. Curls and extends it. Telling me to give her something.

Before I can stop it, a vision of her and Mona flashes before me. My broken and discarded daughter, bruised before birth. Mona’s distended stomach, necrotic and oozing. Walking beside each other over downtown sidewalks, licking ice cream, trails of effluvia behind them as if they’re leaking tar.

Tugging on my leg again. I dig in my pocket, pull out a few coins. “Can’t you say please?”

She shakes her head.

“If you can’t say please I’m not going to give you anything.”

She parts her lips to display a tongue severed at the frenulum then presses her finger into her palm again. I drop the money and turn back to the bar, ask for another drink.

“You shouldn’t have given that to her,” Carissa says.

“Are you joking?”

“She’s going to keep asking for more.”

“She’s four years old.”

“Just saying.”

The bar matron drops another glass before me. I hand her more bills.

“So I’ve got a question for you,” Carissa says. “A proposition, actually.”

“Oh?” Beneath a corner table, the girl folds a piece of cardboard into a series of squares, creates a tiny fort. She walks her fingers into it, her other hand knocking on the door, asking for a cup of sugar.

“I need some help.” She pulls a cigarette from her jacket pocket, lights it with matches sitting on the bar. “I’ve got a part-time job of sorts.”

“What are you, a madam or something?”

She smiles through the smoke, points up at the jazz tune scratching through the air. “Such a great song,” she says. “No, if I was a madam, I’d have enough money to leave here and not have to be a madam. I work with Sal, procuring items, running Favors for, well,” she points behind me, “him, actually.”

I follow her finger to the corner above us and see Arthur Reiss on the television. His hair looks different from before, but there’s the same beautiful weather and I wonder what’s with all the repeat news.

“Okay.” I hold some rye in my mouth, let the bouquet seep up into my sinuses, feel it warm my throat.

“You look like a man who knows his way around, anyway.” She raises her glass to me. “And everyone says you’re honorable to a fault. After watching you with that hunk of cattle the other night,” she says, gesturing vaguely. “Basically, I could use some help. Backup, you know?”

“You need a bodyguard?”

“Not a bodyguard. Someone there in case some shit goes down.” She tosses back the rest of her drink, squints, and shakes her head. “Backup.”

“I don’t know.” I think of Mona, of the two blanks between us and the Plantation, of the cherry blossoms in her hair.

“You’ve got to be bored sitting in front of that place all night, staring at the same sad fuckers who march in just to get thrown out until they can’t march anymore. Think of the adventure you could have. It’s like fighting, but doing some good in the process.”

“I earn money fighting. For a good reason.”

“I’m not saying it’s bad.” She takes a long drag from her cigarette, regrouping. “But this could be fun.”

In my head, I see Mona, the Plantation and cherry blossoms, the old man with the broken wrist, Fancy Clancy and his perpetual shuffle, Mom’s, the Anvil’s fist coming at me.

“You know you’re bored,” she says. “Jesus, I can see it broadcast across your face every night I walk in.”

“I’m fine.”

She holds her arms out. “Look around you, Marcel. This place fucking sucks. If you’re not trying to get out, you don’t realize you’re stuck in it. You need to learn how to have some fun or just fucking kill yourself now.”

Fuck it. I swallow the rest of my glass. “All right.”

“Good.” Her hand touches mine. “Come on.”

I slip off the chair when she pulls. “Where are we going?”

The look on her face says it should be obvious if I weren’t a punching bag.

“Where else?” She shrugs. “Work.”

The orange and pink morning has given way to gray, and in the Financial District, the skyscrapers’ peaks and clouds are indistinguishable from one another. Commuters hustle along the streets, flow in and out of buses, bound up and down the train steps, none of them paying us even a passing glance. Uniformed men trace the sidewalks, sweeping away trash. Singed pieces of what look to be hundred-dollar bills sit crumpled in the gutter. Boys with the haircuts of the privileged stand on the corners holding up signs. Paper is profit. Cash, not ass. Money will save you where Jesus has failed. Basic courtesy is forgotten, or maybe disregarded. Briefcases wielded, coffee splashed, wingtips crushed. I feel safer among the disease and cinders of the Red Light than here.

We pass a park rimmed with an eight-foot chain-link fence. A girl with pigtails sprints through a loft of pigeons, sending out gray, feathered shrapnel. Walking along the edge of the fence is a pregnant woman with hair like cherry blossom bark, carrying two sacks of groceries, a bag with protruding scraps of metal hanging from her shoulder. A bus passes and she’s on the ground, one man repeatedly kicking her while the other tries to pry the bag from her shoulder. None of the passersby stop. She curls fetal, trying to protect herself, her baby, but the bag’s strap is wrapped around her arm and pulls her straight again. Black sludge spills from her. They look up for a flash, and I can see they’re not men but boys, too young to grow facial hair. I go to her—sprint to her, trying to be there when it happens again—fist reared back and ready to destroy them, and before I get to the park the street explodes into white specks.

The cab blares its horn, the tone splitting my temples. Cool hands under my armpits. The scent of sandalwood.

“What the hell?” Carissa says.

I blink away the static and look around. I’m standing two feet from the sidewalk. The cabbie flicks me off and chirps his tires. Carissa keeps me upright.

Across the street, the pigtail girl stalks another loft of pigeons. Businessmen and -women scuttle along the sidewalk. Men sweep the gutters. There is no woman, no black stain.

“I got dizzy.”

She thumbs back my eyelids, examines me. Snaps three times in my face, moves her hand in the pattern of a cross.

“Yeah, you need some part-time work. Boxing is definitely not the best profession for you.” Carissa pulls me between two palm trees painted on the brick wall. “Come on, this is it.”

Grass skirts edge the bar, tiki torches propped up in the corners, flames constantly recoloring the room. The center of the floor is reinforced glass covering a sapphire pond stocked with koi and some fish I don’t know, though the spotted one has the dead black stare of a shark.

I slide into a booth, lay my head against the granite table for a moment, my breath making a halo of condensation.

“You okay?”

I nod, tell her I’m worn out.

“Need to get you some coffee or something.” She points at the bar, says to go order three Mai Tais.

It’s not really a drink becoming of me, but maybe I could use the vitamins.

The bartender’s shirt is ugly enough to induce seizures. He needs to turn sideways to get in and out of the bar. His eyes are rounded with heavy lids and his forehead is flecked with black. He must dye his hair and fake tan to keep the whole Polynesian vibe. I lean against the counter and order our drinks.

He shifts to the side, looking over my shoulder toward our booth. “Thirsty?”

“Dying.”

“Right,” and he threads bottles between his fingers, pours them into a metal shaker. A suited man sits at a raised table along the edge of the pond. The cloth of his suit could pass for scorched tinfoil, not unlike his skin. He’s rapt by the TV over the bar. More Reiss, more reruns, yet still a different one.

The bartender sets two drinks in front of me. “I’ll bring the other one over,” he says.

I catch an explosion of color below me as I cross, the school of fish scattering as the dwarf shark comes close. I slip into our booth again, hand a bouquet to Carissa. We clink glasses and the citrus in the drink burns my throat. That aside, it is easy to drink. I don’t know that I could bring myself to order this without her at my side, however.

“What’s this title thing all about?” She pokes at a pineapple chunk with her straw.

“What do you mean?”

“What’s,” she gestures inarticulately, “the point of it?”

“Why do I do it, you mean?”

“Sure.”

I take a swallow and realize half the drink is gone. “I don’t know. Why not?”

“There are fifteen books on our street alone. Why not take bets? Make your own bets.” She looks to the side and nods. “You could probably make more money that way. Not that it’ll do you much good, but—”

“You wouldn’t want to be champion of something?”

“Champion gets me fuck all. A pretty belt I can use to kill rats and bills to wallpaper my bedroom with.” She pulls a cigarette from her bag, slides it between her fingers. “It’s all worthless.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What is the point?”

“There is no point. That’s the point.” I toss the cherry in my mouth, swallow the fruit and chew the stem. “Not everything needs to have a reason or result.” Things never have a reason, or a result. A puddle of amniotic fluid and a suitcase of blood money are as valuable as cherry blossoms in hair and reflective wood floors.

“I don’t get it.” She says it to me but her head is turned to watch the bartender, who sets the third Mai Tai before the suited man and nods in our direction.

“You sing because you like it, yeah? That’s reason enough.”

Still not looking at me, waving with her fingers at the suited man with her fingertips. “With my grandmother, I liked it. For Sal, I endure it.”

“What are you doing?”

“Making a living.”

I pull her waving hand to me. The force with which I snatch it surprises us both. I drop it as if it will bite back. The brief, crushing thought passes that she is a whore for Sal.

“No. What are you doing now?”

She opens her mouth, to scream, to answer, to tell me to fuck off, but the suited man plops down in our booth before words crest past her lips.

“Hey there.” He sets his half-empty drink down, extends a hand. “Tim Dermott.”

Shaking his hand like a fawn, she says, “Muito prazer. Eu vou para abrir o seu corpo,” with such a smile that I don’t need to know what it means to know I want to break Timothy Dermott’s precious little face.

“Exotic,” he says, raising his glass. “I’ve always loved French. Rolls off the tongue so,” he pauses for dramatic effect, “sweetly.”

He takes a long drink, sucking at the orange slice when the liquor is gone. “Hey, three more over here.” He doesn’t look back at the bar when he orders.

“So, Tim Dermott,” Carissa says. “What do you do?”

Still, the son of a bitch hasn’t looked at me. Orders another drink for me, but doesn’t otherwise acknowledge my presence. I press my knuckles against the corner of the table, imagine the shape his face will make when I crush his tender little cheekbones.

“Well, I can’t quite talk about it, confidentiality and all. But Mr. Reiss—” He shakes his head and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Sorry, drink must’ve gone to my head.”

“Quite all right,” she says, touching the back of his hand. “Go on.”

“Right, well.” His eyelids flutter and he looks around the room. “What was I saying?”

“You were telling us about—”

And she doesn’t need to finish because Timothy Dermott collapses face first on the table.

“Thank fuck,” she says.

I look at her, at the back of Timothy Dermott’s head, at the bartender flipping through channels. She’s already pushed the body out of the booth, his deadweight arm slung around her neck.

She slaps two bills on our table. “Give this to Brian.”

“Who the fuck is Brian?”

She doesn’t answer as she drags Timothy Dermott out the door.

I catch up twenty yards down the street as she’s turning into an alley. The morning air is near freezing but her face is covered in sweat. I touch her shoulder.

“I got it. It’s fine.” Her words are rushed, breath short.

“Carissa.”

“I got it.”

I unwrap his arm, push her aside, and heft him over my shoulder.

She’s almost knocked over by his legs when I turn. “Okay. What the fuck are we doing?”

Her cheeks are glistening and flushed, clouds rush from her mouth, but she still keeps a tone. “We’re working.” She shoves a grease bucket away and opens the door, motioning for me to follow.

Green light sluicing through a wire basket. Wooden shipping palettes stacked seven high, nearing the ceiling. Bits of straw and hay, broken glass bottles. She constructs a makeshift table, tosses a wool blanket over it.

“Lay him down here.”

I do as I’m told because I don’t know what else to do.

Timothy Dermott’s chest rises and falls, shallow but constant.

She drops her black bag beside his head, pulls off his jacket and shirt. She grabs a vial from the front pocket and draws a full syringe, fingertip tapping air bubbles to the top.

“What the fuck is that?”

“I’m not heartless. I don’t want him to get an infection.” She jabs it into his arm, sinks the plunger. “Get the brown bottle from my bag.”

I stand in my place, staring, skin prickling as if all the hairs on my body are being yanked out one by one.

She snaps her fingers. “Marcel. Now. Worse for him if he wakes up.”

Rifling through her bag, I slice my finger on something sharp, grab the bottles and present her with all three.

She nods toward his midsection, says to rub the iodine there. “There’s gauze in the bag.”

His belly turns mahogany in streaks. I don’t know where I’m supposed to clean or exactly what she’s doing, but I get the blooming idea that the stories about organ thieves aren’t just for telling around an oil drum fire.

She lays a swath of knives, needles, threads, clamps, and thin rubber hoses on the blanket, hands me a paper mask.

I motion around the room, at the cobwebs and soiled food and hay. “I don’t think sterility is an issue.”

“It’s for us,” she says. “I don’t know what this pervert has, and I don’t want it squirting up into my mouth.”

“You’re going to take his organs, aren’t you?”

She arches an eyebrow. “Organ.” Beneath the mask she could be smiling, but her eyes seem calm, collected. “Singular.”

“Do you know how to do surgery?”

She extracts a roll of paper tied with a twine bow from the bag and unrolls it on the dusty office desk to the side. “I know how to make clothes. It’s all basically cutting and sewing, really.”

A soft sigh that I realize is skin parting. “What are you taking?”

Her finger leaves a dark smudge on the paper, somewhere in the abdomen of the butcher’s diagram redrawn to human form. “Pancreas.”

I stand back and watch her move. Her hands open the slit flesh, massage the muscles to the sides, ply organs from one another. She disassembles Timothy Dermott’s body the way vultures turn carrion to skeletons. Steadily efficient, but with an unexplainable sort of grace. If the White Swan were covered in blood and pirouetting through meat, this could be presented on a stage. It’s not until she pushes down near the bladder, sending a dark stain across his pants, that the image of Mona on the sidewalk comes crashing down on me. Lying on the sidewalk, moaning, clutching her stomach and trying to scoop everything back inside her, all while I’m across the City at a gym, bloodying another man.

Carissa grunts, says to stop playing with myself and give her a clamp. I hand her three and return to staring.

“Look in my bag. There’s a silver foil pouch in there. Grab it for me.”

“For what?”

She cocks her hip and in her hands she holds a dripping lump of pink and brown, blue veins threading around it.

I fetch the pouch, open it for her. “Don’t you need a cooler or something?”

“What is this? An urban legend? Some detective book? Who walks around with a cooler?” She tips her head to the side and asks if I’m not brain damaged.

“I sound fine, don’t I?”

“Just want to know what I’m getting myself into.”

Something about her tone makes my legs tingle.

“If you go through that door,” she points, holding out the pouch, a drop of blood falling from her fingertip, “there’s ice on the right-hand side. Take this and fill it up. I don’t want it to spoil.”

I swing the door open with my foot, enter a kitchen of some sort. The smell of rotting wood pervades the room. I can feel the mustiness on my tongue. Dripping water plinks into a puddle. I look to the right and find a silver chest with split doors. I begin scooping out handfuls of ice.

Voices close by. I stop scooping, stop breathing. I clutch the foil pouch containing a pirated pancreas, my cohort caught unawares in the next room. I squint, sharpen my hearing. The voice is familiar. Old, manicured by a life of luxury, smoothed by unquestioned power. Arthur Reiss?

Further along the perimeter I come to swinging doors. Flickering neon colors bleed from the other side. I press it open slightly, catch a sliver of a fat Caucasian with dyed hair and a fake tan staring at the television. Brian. The fucking tiki bar.

I weave through the kitchen to the back room, not caring enough to be quiet, but not quite making a noise. Carissa has Timothy Dermott stitched up from pelvis to sternum, only another five inches until he’s waterproof again.

“The bar?”

She looks up, shrugs. “Thirsty?”

I lay the pouch in her bag, not sure how gentle I should be with an autonomous organ, sit and watch while she finishes.

“Will he live?”

“I hope so.” She snips the end of the thread, prepares another syringe. “The first one was antibiotic. This is insulin, to make up for, well, you know.”

I nod.

“He won’t be able to eat right for a while, but he’ll manage.” As she massages the shot through his muscle, a quiet laugh rolls from her chest. “You know, really, injecting himself every day is going to get old quick, so he’ll probably hire someone to find him a pancreas.”

“Oh?”

“So, on the bright side, at least we got ourselves another job.”

Silence fills the early morning apartment. The west-facing windows keep the room dim and cool. Springs jab into my back every time I shift positions on the couch, and I lace my fingers behind my head and try to relax, staring at the shifting shadows on the ceiling. A kidney slips into a liver that splits down the center, becomes two fists nestling into ocular cavities. Amorphous organs made of darkness, ones I’ve seen but couldn’t identify hanging from chains in Chinatown storefront windows. Ribbons of old torch songs weave between the splotches of black stretching thin, effortlessly separating like cleaved flesh, elongating into hands cupped for sculpting, hands arced like protective wings, hands that peck apart the ceiling, baby birds to their mother. Her voice slides in patches from one corner to the other, circles around, keeps distance with silent lefts, disappears with a heavy right. A dark edge appears—the outline of her jaw as she’s bent over a body, concentrating. Reflections halve the twisting shadows. The specks, her glistening forehead, wiped away with the back of her wrist, keeping blood from her face. The dark coalescing into the thin wedge of her chin, her slender cheeks, her twisting hair, swollen lips. And Mona screaming, screaming, screaming.

I run to the bedroom. The sheet winds around her legs, pinning her to the bed. Her arms thrash, beat the mattress. I hold her arms to her side, press on her wrists, make white noise beside her ear.

Five minutes later she’s calm but still trembling. I sit on the edge of the mattress, hands near her shoulder but not touching, humming a constant note to give her focus. As her breathing begins to level, I lean my head against the wall, listening to the blood thrum through my skull.

She grunts, hooks her chin toward the cloth’s edge. I pick up the paring knife and hand it to her. She flicks her head to the side, blows a short breath through her lips that flutters her hair. I pull it back and fold it into a thin ponytail.

Flesh parts easily, the iron cauterizing rough-hewn edges as it passes. Sizzle and pop, the scent of scorched flesh filling my nostrils. I can taste it in the back of my throat but the impulse to gag has since passed.

I hold on to the trader’s toes as Carissa pops a crick from her neck, starts pushing the saw through the ankle. The teeth catch on a hard patch—probably where he’s broken it before, and I wonder if that was from another, earlier unpaid debt or if he slipped on an icy patch. A towel around the cut, she keeps on with the saw until the foot hangs loose in my fingers, a red puddle forming on the tarp below. By the look and smell of the carpet, though, management would hardly notice any additional stains, and I doubt he’d be in danger of losing any security deposit. The flat plane of his stump reminds me of sausage left in the pan until the next morning.

Carissa drops the trader’s separated foot into a foil pouch and lets go a sigh.

“Want to get a concha later?” she says.

“Sure. Warner’s?”

“Of course. Best in the City.” She seals up the foil pouch, keeping the foot fresh inside. Her face is flushed and spent. “That wasn’t too bad, now was it?”

“Not quite how I planned to spend my evening, but it’s getting easier.”

She touches my cheek with a bloody glove, and I flinch. “Such a fragile flower.”

I splash hydrogen peroxide over my face, rub it with my sleeve. “What is Sal going to do with a random foot?”

She hands me the pouch, considers me for a moment. “This one’s off the books.”

“This isn’t for Sal?” I spread some of the ice, nestle the pouch inside.

“Sal ain’t the only game in town.”

“That seems a little risky.”

She points the syringe at me. “Not if you can keep your mouth shut. This whole freelance thing—” Gesturing around the tenement room. “—this involves me, you, and Mr. I Don’t Feel Like Paying My Debts over there. Sal needs to hear nothing of this. You feel the need to chirp, little chicken, and I’ll take your wings next time.”

I hold my palms out, telling her to calm down.

“I’m making sure you know the score.” She unscrews a bottle of something that looks like gelatinous amber and smells like a dead dog’s asshole, extracts a small basting brush.

I sit beside her on the mattress. “Why do you do it, then?”

“Extra money.”

“All of it, I mean. There’s got to be something a little less,” I look around the trader’s one-room apartment, “invasive.”

She rubs the back of her wrist along her forehead, leaving a pale pink smear. “Look, I’m no raging beauty, but I’m easy to look at and I’ve got a voice.” She brushes the amber gel across the trader’s stump, a thin layer of bubbles left in the wake. The sound of fizzing is faintly audible. “I need to get the fuck out of here before I kill myself.”

“So go somewhere else and sing.”

She gives me the look a normal person would spend hours practicing, but that comes naturally to her. “It’s never that easy.”

“Just leave.”

The brush rustles against tarp as she drops it. She blows on the gel to dry it. “Why don’t you leave? You like having your face broke so much?”

I flinch, say it’s not that simple.

“Exactly.”

“No, it’s—” I think of Mona and Plantation, Mona scrubbing our apartment, the sculptures and ghosts of herself stalking the perimeter, the look Tug gives me when I collect, the look on Sal’s face when I tell him I keep standing, the look on Mona’s face when I have to run into the room early mornings and pin her to the bed to keep her from hurting herself. “—it’s different, is all.”

Once it’s dry, she wraps a piece of cloth around the stump, secures it with a piece of rope and lets it fall. Her head hangs loose, her neck like a broken limb. “This is from Sal,” she says, pointing at her leg. “I owed him. I’m paying him back by doing all this,” nodding at the array of knives and makeshift surgical tools.

“How much do you owe?”

“A lot.”

“What do you do for them?”

She swallows. “Stuff.”

The trader’s fingers twitch slightly, rustle on the sackcloth blanket over his bed.

“How much longer are you here?”

“Depends on the job. Little ones like this don’t help with Sal, because he’ll know I went around him. It’s for the mattress, for when I’m done.”

“Like a rainy day account?”

“Fucking pouring.”

The door knob shivers, shakes. I jump to my feet. She tosses a blanket over the body and knives, but his bandaged leg is still hanging out when the door opens. Yellow lamp light glints off the metal pick held behind Carissa’s back.

A bent woman walks in, gray hair askew and two jackets draped over her broad shoulders. She surveys the room, the scene filtering through the clouds behind her corneas. A garbage bag hangs from her hand, veins like cables beneath sun-bleached leather.

She nods a few times. “You come to collect?”

I glance at Carissa. She says yes.

The woman grunts. “Will he be paid up after this?”

Carissa nods. I say maybe. Carissa tries to melt my face with a glare.

She nods again, sets the bag next to the door. “His shopping, when he wakes up,” and she turns, closes the door, leaving Carissa and I to stand beside each other, breathe collective air and stare at cracks in the back of the door.

My wrist turns bruise-dark as tape winds around it. I want to tell myself that it’s a consequence of missing the gym, letting my hands swell up from bloodletting with metal implements and iodine in favor of taped knuckles. Instead, I flex my fingers over my head, shake the excess fluid down my arms. I wrap the plane of my knuckles, squeeze down on the sponge in my palm. Some men use rolls of quarters, bits of pipe inside their grip—I’ve even heard of one genius taping a bullet into his palm, though luckily for all involved, he had his teeth knocked free in the first round—but it’s always felt like shying toward cheating. If you don’t believe you can fell a man by strategy, placement, and an excess of sweat, you shouldn’t be on the canvas in the first place. Granted, I’ve only come across an occasional fighter who feels the same, but still.

Each time the door clanks at the far end of the hall, I find myself on my feet. Footsteps shuffle down the cold, damp corridor. My feet planted orthodox, left leading right by half a step, muscles flexed like a peacock. Each time I’m waiting for her to walk around the corner with a bouquet of severed fingers, a knife, a lump of pink tissue inside a heart-shaped box. Some kind of totem for good luck. And each time the blade of guilt peppers my chest when I find it’s another fighter, cornerman, cutman, mop man, house medic. I superimpose the impossible image of Mona rounding the corner but it never stays.

Clancy rounds the corner, cackling. “I came to tape your right to your dick, so’s you keep it up.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

His fingers grip the chicken wire penning in my quarter. “If you wasn’t a bitch it would.”

“That doesn’t either.” I plop down on the wood.

He yanks the roll from my grip, smacks my hand against my knee and tells me to relax. He begins to wrap the tape around.

“How’s it look out there?”

He breathes a laugh, says, “Hungry.”

“That so?”

“Joking around earlier, but you really do need to keep your right up with this man. He’s got something fierce inside him. More rage than technique.”

“Who is it again?”

“Just a regular-ass knucklehead who’s fit to damage you because it gets him off.”

Echoes in the hallway. Footsteps. My head turns to it like a fox to a snapping twig. Clancy twists my thumb back, hot rods shooting up my forearm. I yank back. “The fuck, Clancy?”

“I’m trying to help you out here. You don’t want to listen, I’ll go back to my plastic cup out there.”

“I’m listening.” Footsteps growing louder, now shuffling.

“Then look at me.”

I exhale, tip my head down to him.

“He’s got some nefarious shit up in him. I recognize his cornerman from down the way. Man’s a bathroom chemist.” He finishes with a few more strips around my wrist, shores up my thumb. “You need to stay up on him. Keep him at a length so he can’t blow nothing at you, but don’t forget he’s not above a few blades.”

I peek over his shoulder and see old Oscar pushing his mop down the gully. “Okay.”

“Make sure your head stays on right, hear?” Hands on the rebar, he pushes himself standing. “Who you got in your corner?”

“Old Man Shirley.”

Clancy grunts approval and I stand, throw a series of punches at the fridge, tiny dimples in each spot. Two uppercuts, and I jump up and down in place, working blood through my legs, swinging my arms to the side, tossing my head back and forth. Clancy holds my hands up to his face, smacks my knuckles a couple times and nods. As he turns, I ask how he got back here anyway.

He smiles. “’Cause of you. People think I’m friends with you, I must be stand-up too.”

Under the bright light, the boy’s not so much a boy as a monolith, a Greek warrior resurrected. His chest is leather armor. I meet him in the middle, look up at him.

I swallow. “You up, or you in?”

He looms above me, inhales, exhales. Every muscle ripples when he moves his arm. His beating-ridged brow casts a shadow over half of his face. The breath from his nostrils makes my arm hair tremble.

“All right, then.” I take two steps back and wait for the bell. When it comes, he doesn’t move. I keep my hands up, approach him slowly. The crowd screams for blood. I throw a few cheap jabs, not willing to put myself within the Monolith’s wingspan. A quick look back to Old Man Shirley, who flicks his hands forward the same way you encourage a timid child.

Fists in front of my mouth, I yell, “Come on.”

His chest heaves. Nostrils flare. Still he stands.

The crowd begins to quiet.

I pull my hands in close, say, “What the fuck are you doing?” and my head ratchets to the side. I can feel my jaw leading my body, feel the weightless flutter in my stomach as my feet leave the canvas. White lights and fireflies.

Old Man Shirley snaps his fingers, slaps my cheek. A breeze across my waist and cold water splashed over my nuts pulls me from the tar black recesses. I realize I’m sitting in my corner. The Monolith stands across the ring, hands on his head.

“I told you to stay away from him.”

“I thought I did.”

“Do better.” He grabs my wrists, yanks me up. The noise of the crowd swirls around me, tracers crisscrossing the ring. I swat them away, hear Shirley grunt, feel a prick in my neck. I turn and he’s holding the empty syringe in his hand. “Help with the swelling,” he says, and the tracers evaporate.

I’m stumbling at the Monolith again. He pulls his arm back and I step forward, land on his foot and stick two rights into his gut, sinking my knee into his. He tips back but he’s caught under my foot, and I dig down and try to ruin his chin with an uppercut. It skips off the side but sends him reeling.

He reconstructs himself quickly, jutting out with a right. I slip it, find his kidney with two shots and as I set up to crush his jaw, I catch a flash and feel a stunning coldness spread through my cheek.

I run my hand across my face and it’s deep red, wine mixed with cornstarch. So much it looks fake. I press fingertips to find the cuts and my index slips into my cheek. A jagged edge around the hole in my face. I turn to Shirley, like his confirmation will somehow make it okay. He’s already rushing through the ropes with gauze and adrenaline 1:1000 in his paws. He pushes me back into the corner. I swing around, lay a bead on the ref.

“What the fuck was that? He stabbed me in the fucking face.” Shirley throws me back into the seat.

“I couldn’t see what happened,” the ref says. The fucker won’t even look at me.

“How much did they give you?”

“Trainer, you have forty seconds.”

“How much—” A fire blazes inside my skin.

“Stop jawing so I can close you.” He presses my hand against the bandage, trying to dry it as much as possible for the Avitene. “He’s going to keep coming for you, I told you this.” A beige swatch in the middle of the red gauze. Detached skin. More stinging, Q-tips forged from fire. “Keep him at bay with a left. Couple quick ones. Wait till he pivots on his back foot, then slip. Hold this.” He drops a coil of black fishing line in my hand. “After you slip, clip his ear. He’ll bobble, so sink another two.”

Pinpoints of bright white along my cheek. Skin stretched, pressed in and pulled out.

“Remember, jaw first to make him wobble, then destroy his temple. Hit him till he stops twitching.” He pulls a lighter from his pocket, sets the flame under the line, thumbs the hot end into a flat stopper.

“Ten seconds, trainer,” the ref says.

I start to yell at him but Shirley smacks my ear, smashes a fistful of gauze on the side of my face and tells me to hold it while he winds tape around my head.

“Time, trainer.”

He kneels before me. “Keep him away. He’ll kill you, he gets a chance. There’s extra money on those.”

I nod.

“Now, trainer.”

“Not till he stops twitching.” Shirley pulls me up. I catch a glimpse of the crowd over his shoulder. In the third row, Carissa stands with the rest of the bloodthirsty masses, screaming with her thin wrists waving above her head.

The ref stops me, inspecting the tampon taped to my head. Speaking without looking at me, he says, “I’m not going to stop him.” He pushes down a loose end of tape. “I thought you should know that.”

I tell him I appreciate the warning, then slam my forehead against his. A rainbow of dots float across the ring, scatter with a few blinks. The ref crumples on the canvas.

What could pass as a smile materializes on the Monolith’s face. He nudges the ref out of the ring with his feet, not looking over the edge when he falls to the concrete floor.

The primal window of advantage opens before me and as soon as I recognize it, I see a man grab Carissa’s arm, pull her to the aisle. One of Sal’s lackeys. My body flushes, the plug in my feet pulled and tossed aside. The Monolith turns to me, raises his hands, advances.

I follow Shirley’s words, leading with lefts to keep him at a distance. When he tries a cross, I counter with my right. Twice more I connect with half-hearted shots, favoring repetition and placement over power. He doubles down and there’s a glow emanating from the back of his head, a soft yellow light like the kind I’d always heard precedes the long, quiet walk to death. I raise my fist back. No one will stop this fight. There’s extra money on death matches. He won’t see anything but blackness and an enveloping warmth.

A soft jab on his shoulder, spinning him. Haymaker, death-dealer still cocked back, I wait for him to square up before I crush his jaw. Arcing blood from his mouth, a tooth twisting through the air. Another uppercut to his kidney, a flurry of hooks to his plexus, stealing his breath, keeping it for myself. The Monolith tries to stand, tries to breathe, but I collect all the rage of Carissa and Mona and focus it on his mouth. He tips to the side, jaw swaying loose, my hand dripping red. I pounce on him, lacing knuckle after knuckle into the soft separation between bone and flesh and bone. He tries to block, throws his hands up and spreads fire across my shoulder and chest. I shove them aside with an elbow and unleash an overhead right, crushing the bridge of his nose. His breath comes in great wet bubbles. Blood flings across me when he throws his head back, trying to keep his bearings and counter. I smear it across me, trying to wipe it away, and my finger catches.

A long weeping slash across my chest. A dripping line down my shoulder. I look up at him, at the metal shard glinting on the underside of his palm.

His hands raise before his face, elbows pinch in, but it’s more rote movement than a cohesive attack. I take two great bounds and use the momentum to drive my fist into his temple. Again. Again. Again. Again. My hand aches. Again. Again. My shoulder burns with broken glass and rust. Again. Again. His body creases at the waist, the elbows. Folds into a heaving mass of slippery red origami. Again. Again. There is no one to stop the fight. Again, and I feel a snap inside my hand.

I roll off him, heart throbbing through my back pressed against the canvas. A pool of blood touches my arm. I try to raise my head, check for Carissa, but my body is broken and leaden, so I stare at the locust, perpetually circling the light.

Needles dance across my fingertips, along the lifelines in my palms. The wooden bench rubs against the nubs of my spine. Arms crossed over my chest, seams of Avitene striating my skin.

I have traded staring at one light for another. This one has a wire cage around it, though, and no locust. The barking crowd has dimmed, headed toward the train back home, toward bars to recount the way the Monolith’s jaw swung, toward a corner to find some girl and get out all the testosterone the violence stirred up. Down the hall, the door clangs shut. I have a sudden urge to get a drink with Clancy.

After my fingers stop tingling, I pull myself upright, feel fluid lap against the inside of my skull. A click inside my hand when I move it. Feels like a broken pinkie, though I guess I’m lucky it’s not a metacarpal and I can tape it before the final bout. Rustling noise in the hallway. I push myself up off the bench, open the meat locker and pull out an old shirt. Unscrew the pipe with the wrench to wet the fabric. I set the sleeve between my teeth and peel back the bandage covering the hole in my face. Cool air stings the ragged edge. My jaw flexes, teeth feel like they’re bending outward, ready to snap. After the floating specks clear, I find a syringe of anesthetic and slide the needle under my skin.

“You look like shit.”

The quarters move in slow motion as I turn. She leans against my locker, pea coat draped over her, a green-and-white striped scarf tossed over her shoulder. Black bag clutched in her tiny fist. I nod and try not to smile, partly because it would tear my wound further, and partly because I can’t feel my face.

“You should see the other guy.”

“Oh, I did. He’s a peach.” Red rings around her eyes. Fingers weaving together, pulling apart, picking at dangling buttons. “You okay?”

I laugh, then kneel down to keep from collapsing altogether. She comes over, crouches beside me, and pulls me close.

“Sorry. Guess that should’ve been obvious.”

“A little.” Old smoke and the hint of floral perfume on her. “You want to get a concha?”

“Two, please.”

I heft myself up to the bench, and she surveys my face. “He did a shitty job of closing this.”

“He’s a hundred and five. What do you expect?”

“Lay down and be quiet.” She folds the shirt under my head, hangs her jacket on the locker door. Metal clinking in her bag. The light flickers inside its cage. Her face rises over me, a needle glimmering like a teardrop. “How much did you put in?”

“Little more than half a syringe.”

“Is it Lidocaine?”

I nod.

“You have more? For your chest?”

I shake my head.

“Sucks for you.”

I nod.

She threads the needle, leans over me, and goes to work. A blast of freckles on the bridge of her nose I never noticed. Her hair brushes my whole-cheek, sends a shock of electricity through my brain, lighting up lobes and crackling synapses in cortices long dormant, since before Mona’s attack. I let my tongue peek between my lips, touch the tips of her hair, taste her. Construct an idea of how her neck would taste, how the skin between hip and stomach would feel on my tongue, how her eyelids would depress beneath my lips.

“What are you doing?” She pulls her head back, tucks her hair behind her ear.

“I had something in my throat.”

“You need to sit up?”

I give a slight shake and she pokes the needle through my skin, pulls the thread taut, pinches flesh and pokes again, all the while humming to herself. A familiar tune, one I think she’s sung at the Gurney.

“Are you all right?” I say.

She purses her lips in concentration. “Fine. Why?”

“You’ve been crying.”

“I’m not crying.”

“Then you’ve been slamming meth.”

She looks to the side, pulls the thread taut again. Twice more and says she’s done, ties a knot. I begin to sit up and she presses a hand to my forehead. “You’ve still got two on your chest.”

I lie back down, focus on the light again. “So what’s wrong?”

“I get squeamish around blood.”

“Right. Forgot.”

“Cuts make me nauseated.”

“You want to cut the shit and talk to me like a normal person?”

She says this is going to hurt then pinches together folds of my chest and stabs the needle through.

“Carissa.”

“They extended my time.”

“What?” I start to sit and she pushes me back down, more exasperated than compassionate.

“‘Capitalized interest,’ they said. ‘It’s just business, sweetheart, so no need to take offense.’”

I let go a long exhale and focus on the metal piercing my skin, the running sensation of thread pulled through my insides. “Can’t you pay them off?”

“With what money?”

“Don’t use money.”

She holds the needle up, shakes it, gives me that favorite look of hers.

“There’s got to be something you can give him. Trade him. Know any friends?” I gasp as she yanks on the thread too hard.

She sighs. “You know Sal’s old school. How many people have you taken to the pig farms in the Outskirts?”

“None.”

“Well, the pigs squeal when they see him.” She pauses to clean the thread, thumbing off a glob of tacky blood that’s catching on skin. “They’ll never give up cash, even if it’s only wallpaper.”

“What are you going to do? Keep working for him? Sing in a shitty parlor and wilt into a sad old fucker like the rest of them?”

“I don’t know. Jump in front of a train?”

“Really.”

She slams her hands on my stomach, forgetting about the gaping ravine in my skin. “I don’t know, Marcel. What the fuck am I supposed to do? Walk the streets till I find fifty grand lying in a garbage can?”

“Maybe.”

“Can we not talk about this?”

She leans over my chest, lips sucked in and eyebrows knitted into a severe V. I see her singing on a grand polished-hardwood stage, rouge velvet curtains cascading down either side, an archaic microphone before her scarlet lips. A satin dress the color of oceans I can only imagine undulating from her hips, masking her knotted leg as she pours herself into song after song. I see her, back knotted like her leg, limbs shriveling back into her body, disintegrating on a stool in the corner of the Gurney next to the guitar player and his arthritic hands. Cigarette ash matching her skin and hair. I see Mona sauntering down the Plantation’s drive, cherry blossoms and cascading hair. Her hands flitting over clay, nipping in and out of recesses, crevices, creating beauty from a mound of wet earth. I see her being dragged down the drive of the Plantation, escorts’ meaty hands clamped on her elbows, sets of black scabs scoring her forearms, dead skin under her fingernails. Those same hands polishing divots into the counters, the floors.

“The purse for the championship is fifty grand.”

“That’s lovely.” She doesn’t look up.

I swallow, wince as the needle catches on a fold of scar tissue. “I could give you the money.”

The stretching and poking stops. She looks up at me in disbelief or hesitation or caution. “You could do that?”

Tapping footsteps pass behind us. I hear the rattle of Mona’s sculpting tools knocking against each other inside the rosewood box as she dusts the top, moves them aside to clean the shelf they sit on, her patterns and intensity never deviating, never diminishing. Throat clearing. I see Tug behind us, rustling a fingerprint-smeared envelope in his hands. He looks at Carissa leaned over me, pushes out his lips and nods. I tell him I’ll be up in a few minutes.

My swollen hand envelops hers. “I could do that.”

“You can’t do that.”

“Beauty is a garden. Left untended it will wither and die.” I pat her hand. “And I’m not much for wallpaper anyway, so what else am I going to do with it?”

Her lip disappears under her teeth, maybe trying to hide a smile or focus on something else to stem tears. She leans down, hair falling and brushing my chin, sweet breath covering my face. I let myself dissolve into her darkness. Her thin forearms press against my bare skin, her fingers gripping the back of my biceps, bringing me to her. Her teeth take my bottom lip between them, her tongue running the edge.

Bright light, cool air. She wipes her face with the back of her hand, fumbles for the needle. Tells me, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t’ve. Twice she miscues the needle, her wrists trembling.

I sink into the knobs of wood beneath me, let the caged light throw jagged shapes across the inside of my eyelids.

“It’s going to be a sad day when one of them finally spills your brains,” Tug says. His usual denim shirt is now plaid flannel, though the stains and dried food is reminiscent. Bean and beer cans are the same. “I’m going to have a hard time maintaining the life I’ve become accustomed to if I don’t have people betting you’re finally going to get yours.”

“Sorry to be a killjoy.” I touch the interwoven thread holding my cheek together. It feels like a child’s knitting project.

He waves a dismissive hand. “On the plus side, Bishop, when the day finally does come, I’m wagering a whole flock on butterflies are going to come barreling out of there. Be like the final plague or something.”

“As long as you can call the books on it, right?”

He clucks his tongue, shoots me with his finger gun, says that’s why he loves having me around. With this, he slides the envelope across his desk to me. “I assumed you wanted cash?”

“This is from today?” I give a quick laugh, smack the envelope on my hand. “And here you always tell me I’m an unprofitable model.”

“You have me there, Bishop.” He pulls out another envelope, this one two inches thick. “Though this is for that other man.”

“Oh.” I glance down at mine, which is thinner than a cigarette.

“Might not have much left after he fixes up what you’ve imparted on him.”

I raise mine in thanks, push back my chair.

“You got a new cornerman?” He doesn’t bother to hide his smirk.

“How so?”

“Seen you around with that little darling, recently.”

I look around the room because I don’t know what else to do. “Just a friend.”

“Shit, wish I had friends like that.” He plunks his feet on his desk, craning his head back. “I can’t condone it, being a man of God and all, but if anyone deserves some tenderness, it’s you.” He nods to some vague point, a gesture I assume is supposed to indicate Mona.

“She’s a friend, Tug.”

“Try not to lose focus, is all I’m saying.” He leans forward, elbows resting on a wrinkled pile of photos, various grainy faces with ridged brows and cauliflowered ears, some with red slash marks, others with black checks. “You only got one more fight. I’d hate to see you go before that.”

“Be hard to get envelopes like that without me, right?”

Head bobbing side to side, he says, “Be careful. Eyes on the prize, yeah?”

The chicken on my plate looks like it hadn’t eaten in more than a month before being cooked, and it didn’t have to be slaughtered so much as encouraged to jump under the axe. Sprigs of something I believe had once been rosemary jut from the breast at assorted angles. Gravy separates into grease and water as it soaks into the potatoes, but at least the potatoes now have some vague notion of moisture. Sliced beets are the one spot of color on the entire plate, but they’re discs of dyed leather from sitting in the oven for three hours.

I scrape my teeth against the bone, partially to let none go to waste and partially to make the meat tender enough to swallow. The whole time my head is tilted to keep food from lodging inside the hole in my cheek. Mona stands at the sink, attacking the roasting pan with steel wool.

“You sure you don’t want more?” I push the plate forward to get her to eat more, not that she’s in danger of wasting away. If I force anything else, I’ll throw up in my mouth and that’s bound to sting the shit out of my cheek.

“Elias was over while you were out and we ate. The rosemary was a nice touch, I think.” She touches her fingertips to her wrist with a birdlike twitch, her skin tinted from handling beets. With no ceremony, she digs back into the pan. Steel wool scratches against metal and the skin along my spine turns gooseflesh.

“The last bout’s coming up soon.”

“That’s great, honey,” she says, rinsing one side of the pan, running her hand over it, rinsing the other, inspecting, rinsing, inspecting, rinsing.

Tapping the bone in my hand like a Neanderthal conductor so I won’t flap my hands and fly away, I clear my throat. “I made it to the championship, you know.”

“You’re doing so great with that.”

Washing her hands now.

“Yeah, it should be a good one. Good opponent.” I have no idea who I’m fighting. “Maybe the best I’ve fought so far.”

“I’m sure you’re better, darling.” A sponge now, scraping at her hands, trying to get the red off. “Is this the one that will—that I can,” she trails off.

“It is. This’ll take care of you, Mona.”

Grunts and an animal whine.

“Mona.”

Heavy breathing.

“Goddammit, Mona.”

I hurry over to her. Steel wool sloughs away her skin. I snatch the pad from her hand and grip her fingers in my palm, hold her arms tight against her body. Bleeding lines cover her forearms. I squeeze her against me, keep her from thrashing. Her body vibrates and her shoulders writhe against the seam of stitches on my chest. Some of her muscles spasm, maybe the heave before a cry, and her head lurches back, cracking against the hole in my face. Blood rushes beneath the skin, bile riding a charge of pain up my throat. My knees disappear and I squeeze her tighter as we tumble to the ground, my shoulder breaking our fall against the cabinet. Her body is self-destructing, alternating between nestling in my chest and scrambling to be unencumbered. I make the shushing white-noise sound. By the time the thrashing subsides, my mouth is dry.

“Another week, just one more. We’ll call and get you on their list.” I start to hum a tune to calm her so she can sleep without medicine. It’s not until the second chorus that I realize I don’t know the lyrics, only the melody, because the words are Portuguese.

A long sigh and her body shifts forward, dry lips breathing on my forearm. She’s fallen asleep. I lift her up inch by inch, the adhesive and thread spanning my torso threatening to give up the ghost and let loose my insides. Twisting sideways, I get through the door and drape her across our bed. I fetch the gauze from my gym bag and wrap her hands like a fighter’s, keeping the layers thin so the wounds can breathe. I give her an air kiss, an inch from her forehead to avoid waking her, and resign myself to the couch.

It was inevitable, really. Beautiful things, dependable things, they’re only as permanent as the attention they’re paid. A garden left untended will wither and die. Talent untapped will turn to ash. Without appreciation, we’re no better than those we scorn.

I keep this in mind as I watch two fucktards use the leg of my stool as a spit to roast a hunk of meat. Apparently I left it outside, and now it has returned to the earth. Farewell, friend. You supported me well.

I nod at patrons as they approach the Gurney, search them for weapons or dummy chips or decks of cards, hoist them from the concrete and toss them in the alley when they depart. Gamblers come and go, the sun rises and falls, the City awakens and slips back into its coma.

At some point, the moon hanging high, Fancy makes his way over. He’s full of conciliatory words about the Monolith, what a cheating piece of shit he is, how someone should really crack down and enforce the rules to keep fights fair.

I nod, say definitely.

He breathes fumes, though, so I assume this bout of camaraderie is more a lack of oxygen to the brain than a desire for pugilistic reform. He winds his way to the upcoming fight.

“The real question is, how you feeling about it?” he says. “Luger’s a real son of a bitch.”

“That’s the word on the street.”

“I fought him twice, back when.” Fancy takes a slug from an eggplant-colored glass bottle. The smell leads me to believe it could strip the warts right off half the girls from Norma Jean’s. “That bastard hid packets of acid under his tongue in case he needed it.”

“Needed it for what?”

Clancy looks at me like I’m a talking ape. “To spit in your face.”

“What if it’d broken and he swallowed it?”

“You got to hit him in order for it to break.”

I step aside for one of the madams from Mom’s, motion politely inside, turn back to Fancy. “And this is the guy I have to fight with the wind whistling over my face like a goddamned milk jug?”

“Don’t have to fight him, but yeah.” He shrugs, knowing that it’s never a question of have to. “Still feeling so cocky?”

I scratch the back of my neck, tempted to tell Clancy that it’s not being cocky but confident, and if I can’t be confident that talent and blood-draining determination will ultimately defeat cutthroats and cheats, I might as well jump in front of a train. Before I can enlighten him, Sal throws the door open, nods for me to join him inside.

“Who’s going to watch the door?”

He looks side to side, says we’ll be fine. Clancy ambles back down to Norma Jean’s to waste more money.

I pass between chipped tables, felt tops scarred with cigarette burns, spilled drinks, and knife marks. Carissa and the guitar player perform in the corner, she in a blue dress reminiscent of the one I’d imagined. She curves her back and neck as she sings, makes her body the scythe with which she attacks the soul of anyone listening. The gamblers, though, they focus on their cards, their hands near each other’s chip piles and pockets.

I slip into the corner booth, across from Sal. The table’s wooden top is bare but for a sweating drink and serrated knife. He stares at some point behind me. I fight the urge—knowing he’s staring at Carissa—but I am weak, and when I do turn, she looks at the same time. Our eyes meet as she leads into a crescendo, arching her body, using her twisted leg to make the scene more dramatic, though I’m the only one really watching, really listening. Because what she’s saying, I know she’s saying it to me. I twist back to Sal and his fingers are knitted together the way children fashion a church steeple with their hands. The slight fault line of a smile on his lips.

“Any idea what she’s saying?” he says.

“I don’t speak French.”

The smirk shifts slightly. “How’s Mona?” he says.

I grab the cocktail waitress as she passes our table, ask for a cup of coffee.

“Doing that well?”

“She’s sleeping better without the medication. Seemed like it made her dreams a little better but knocked her deeper down.”

“So now she wakes up screaming every night?”

“At least she can wake up.”

He sucks his lips in, swirls the ice cubes inside his glass. The waitress returns with my coffee.

“Heard this final’s going to be a tough one.”

“That’s the rumor.”

“You feeling froggy?”

I point at my cheek. “I think I can beat him, but apparently I’ve underestimated the lengths to which fuckwits will go to win.”

“Appears so.”

“But, yeah, I think I’ve got him.”

He looks over my shoulder again. This time I manage to resist. “Noticed you two around recently.”

I take a slug from my coffee, nearly have to chew it down. “You know that Mona doesn’t go out anymore.” We both know Mona’s not a part of this equation.

“That’s about what I figured.” He pours the rest of the drink down his throat, waves his hand to get another. “Let me get down to it. I’ve seen you fight. I know you’re a good fighter, a great fighter. I’d go so far as to say you might be the best fighter in the City.”

“I appreciate that, but—”

“I’m not finished.” He fingers the blade. “There ain’t no way you’re putting down Ezekiel. You can’t take it like you used to, and they keep it straight Old Testament out his way.”

“Clancy said it was Luger.”

“Clancy’s Juice-pickled and punch-drunk.” He laughs to himself, gives a low whistle. “Luger had his face blown off at a whorehouse last night. Some crazy fuck looking for his daughter went buck wild with a shotgun. Luger was tied up all sexy-like and the man walked in, went bang bang.”

“Shit.”

“This isn’t a bad thing for you, you know.” He pauses for a moment as the waitress places his drink on a stained napkin. He gives a thin smile, telling her to kindly fuck off. “You had your time, Marcel, but that time is gone. I want you to know all of this, because I’m putting fifty thousand on you to lose. I’m doing you a favor.”

“How is that a favor?”

“You fall in this fight, not many people think twice about it. ‘He’s getting old,’ they’ll say. ‘Great pug in his time, though.’”

“I don’t need to fall. I can beat him.”

“You’re not listening, kid. Your reputation will stay with you, and this whole shady business doesn’t leave the booth. But you make sure I get my spread—” He nods behind me again. “—and me and her can have ourselves a nice conversation on the ride to the train station.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“You don’t need to keep up airs by asking rhetorical questions.”

I swallow the rest of my coffee, feel it gurgle through my guts.

“And before you feel the need to ask, should you get all noble on me, the other conversation will be between her and my axe on the way to the farms. And you, dear friend,” he taps the back of my hand with his blade, leaving a thin leaking line, “can pay me for her.”

Words swirl and bash against the inside of my skull, none of them coming anywhere close to my tongue.

“Or, shit, I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe I’ll just double hers and what you owe just for pissing me off. Who can tell these things?”

“Those don’t sound like wildly different options.”

“They do if you’re that little sweetheart over there.”

“Still.”

“You’re missing the point, Marcel.” He leans forward. “Yes, you very well could beat him, but you’re coming out damaged, if you’re even coming out.”

“He’ll be a test.”

“You need to go down. She needs you to go down.” He leans back against the booth, knits his hands behind his head. “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe even Mona needs to you to fall, too. Point is: your face is in the canvas or her head is in a vise.”

He diverts his attention to a table two down from the corner, where a Chinese man herds a large pile of chips, brings them into his fold. I no longer exist at this table. I toss back my cup, though there’s nothing in it, and make for the door.

Carissa yelps, Nao, throws her body forward, working it into the song. Arm out, fingers curled, trying to touch me from across the room. The guitar player slams his hands against the strings, coerces every bit of life from them. Her voice creeps from a low register, climbing notes like fire escape steps to a bedroom window, shouting the highest notes until her voice shreds, falls in ribbons around her, us. Head pointing down, lips resting on the microphone, she looks up. With a throat coated in sandpaper and broken glass, she lets go a deep sigh, says, “Nao me arrependo de nada.” Breath courses over the microphone, a slight flutter in the rhythm.

I press my hand to my mouth, tip it slightly, as if I’m sneaking her a kiss, before turning toward the door.

I trudge through the Red Light’s streets, passing an old Vietnamese restaurant with scorch marks along the walls, stepping around thin bones I hope are canine. Paper bags stained the color of mud, a few winking needles and singed foil. Stardust and un-children are nonexistent yet omnipresent in this neighborhood. A door swings open and almost crushes my nose. I take it as a cosmic sign that I need a drink.

Liam’s Pint House feels more like an actual Irish pub than an authentic Irish pub. Weathered red and green paint, wood and tarnished brass accents everywhere. Bottles of near-empty whiskey hang behind the bar, rimmed by a dozen shields indicating various beers. Two wooden kegs sit at the end of the bar.

I pull out a stool, and a shrunken nub of a woman appears from below the bar. “What’ll I have you?”

“Whatever people in here like to drink.” She gives a toothy smile and grabs a glass. A couple stools down from me, a man breathes into his beer. His jacket looks softer than my bed sheets; the beard covering his face seems haphazard, rushed. He waves his hand for a refill, then surveys the bar, scouring the layers of dust for someone trailing him. Something familiar about him.

“Hey.” I point my finger at him. His nose has been broken and poorly set. “You’re the lapdog.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re Arthur Reiss’s guy.”

He has little response to this, continues waiting patiently for his beer.

“Why aren’t you drinking caviar wine in some marbled bar with little Polynesian children serving you?”

“You don’t watch the news very much, do you?”

“Only when I’m drinking.”

He smiles, tips his glass to me. “Good man.”

My beer tastes like it’s been sitting on a windowsill all day. “Sorry, miss.” I lean over to her. “This beer tastes like trough water.”

“It’s cask ale, love. Supposed to be like that.” And it’s not so much not understanding the beer as it is the way she cups my chin, like a child who’s finally figured out not to shit in their pants, that sends blood through my cheeks. I lower myself into my stool and replace stale with cultured.

“So, you hiding or running?” he says.

I look around, though there’s no one else in the pub. “Neither.”

“Contemplating.”

A swallow. The smell of old, damp wheat. “Sure.”

“The Greeks once said that no man is an island. No one can change the world.”

“I’m not sure that was the Greeks.”

He slurps his drink. “Whoever it was, they were right. There’s only so much one man can control, you know?”

I can only nod, take half of the glass in a quick, large gulp. When I thump my chest to move it down, I feel a dripping down my chin. I touch my cheek and find my beer has seeped through the stitches. This cannot bode well for the fight.

“What can you do, though—just give up?” I say.

“No.” He smirks. “Drink.” Another down his throat. I hope he doesn’t live far from here.

“There is that, lapdog.” I follow suit and finish the barnyard beer.

The barmaiden appears from nowhere. “Another, love?”

“God no.” I pull a few bills from my pocket. “Four fingers of rye, please.”

“The past is fucked, as far as I can tell,” he says. “We try to pretty it up, give the revisionist version of our crises, but the bones are just as brittle and soon enough, the whole body will collapse. You just have to pull yourself together and chop off the thing at the neck, build your own body.”

For a flash, I see it as a conversation with myself, each arm craned up to the heavens, Mona’s head perched on one hand, Carissa’s on the other. They chatter like hens, my thumb inside their lower mandibles. I don’t know what they’re saying because they’re such good friends they’ve established their own language, and I only know that the overall feeling of the conversation is grotesquely optimistic.

“What do you do with the parts? What if they can make a new body?” She sets a glass at my hands and I drink half in one gulp to wash away the decapitated image.

“Old parts are a joke. They sit there and remind you of the body that’d been there. If you put them together, you have a mangled creation that will only walk into walls. They serve no purpose but to torture you every time you pass by.” He takes a long, considered sip, holds it in his mouth, then sets his glass down with a thump and turns to me. “You have extra parts, you sell them and move on. If they’re worthless and you can’t get anything, light them on fire to warm your hands.”

The apartment is silent. The special kind of emptiness that only follows some complete revelation of violence. The kind of silence that lurks around our apartment every night.

Dumb son of a bitch. Don’t you remember drinking too much makes you maudlin?

I peel off my jacket and pull the fucker’s decaying tooth from my pocket. Since when has it become acceptable to continue badgering someone, an ordinary citizen, for dope money even after said citizen repeats in a polite tone they’d love for you to go fuck yourself? Since always, if I’m being honest, but why is that all right is the real question. I flip on the faucet, run my knuckles under the cold water, scrub some soap into the gash his tooth left. I don’t particularly want coke-procuring cum seeping in my veins.

After my hand is suitably clean, I stick my face under, let the water shock my nerves, get my head straight. Lapdog had the amiable ability to make me drink like a moron. I suck down water until my stomach is bloated, let the anger drip out my fingers.

I kick off my boots, shove them under the couch, and creep down the hallway to our room on exaggerated tiptoes.

Mona lies fetal in the middle of the bed, a shallow-breathing kidney bean. The curve of her back, nubs of her perfectly aligned spine, pressing against the sheet. Her mother was of the book-balancing persuasion and made Mona walk the length of their house with a surgical textbook atop her head. Each time it fell meant a rap over the knuckles with her wooden cooking spoon. Mona would complain that her mother had ruined her, but when she lost herself inside a sculpture, her hands ducking in clay crevice, smoothing the curve of a woman’s hip, bringing the point to a garish elbow, her posture remained perfectly straight, the iron rod of her mother’s psyche implanted in her spine. Her hands were magical things. I’d sit and watch them scoop ten pounds of wet earth from the oil drum we kept, plop it on her platform and begin to pull it skyward, stretching and compressing and smoothing and bending until it wasn’t a glob but an anthropomorphic representation of Earth. She’d brush flyaway hairs back from her face with the back of her wrist, blow them away with a short puff to keep clay from her face.

This creation, though, she metered it. She brought into existence real things where there had only been mass. She created something from nothing. Why can’t I do the same? If her attack created a need for space, for cleanliness, and I gave her that, could I accommodate her for too long? The absence of touch and dirt had created its own need within her, and by trying to help her for too long I’d done more damage. What could the Plantation give her that I couldn’t? Like they know her better than her own husband. I can love her, even if it’s loving her into oblivion, and rewire the synapses in her brain. Carissa can have the money from fighting because I will heal Mona myself.

Still on tiptoes, I make my way around the bed, stepping extra slow so I don’t kick something and startle her. I lower my body down beside her. A hundred thousand feathers are simultaneously plucked from my skin. Her body radiates heat and I curl beside her like a cat, not touching but close enough that I can inhale her. Long-dormant lobes of my brain light up. I hold it in for a moment, exhale when she does, matching our breathing. Strands of hair tickle my nose, and I remember the early morning sunlight in our first apartment turning those hairs electric, my face nestled in the crook where her neck slopes into her shoulders, where she loved to be kissed. My cells scream out for her and I loop my arm over her chest, skin on fire as soon as it touches hers and a scream pierces the night, sucking air from my lungs.

Palms slam on my chest. Nails rake across my face, a corner snagging in the woven thread. Feet rain down on my thighs.

I say it’s okay it’s okay it’s me so fast and so many times that it loses all meaning and I have to wonder if there was any in the first place. Her body is a random assortment of thrashing limbs and her fist tags me in the eye before I’m able to cinch her arms against her chest, white noise in her ear. Aftershocks run through her body. I tighten after each one, make the white noise louder until her raging ocean is a windy lake, lay her back in bed and swaddle the sheets around her torso so she’ll feel secure and be able to sleep.

When her breathing has returned to a normal rhythm, I make my way back to the living room, grab my boots and jacket, and head out into the night.

A man comes to me on the corner, starts to ask, do you know where the train—and I uncork a vicious right that unhinges his jaw, a left, a right, a left, and on and on, and it’s only the warm pool of piss at my knee that brings me back to the frozen sidewalk, to the lump beneath me, sputtering blood and breath. I grab a newspaper from a nearby bench, press on his cheeks like I’d actually be able to stop the bleeding, then hurry away.

I peel back a strip of tape, tighten it around my palm and throw a half-speed jab. Old Man Shirley hasn’t shown his mug yet, but I asked Tug three times to bring him in for me. A double stock of supplies sits in my bag, but if one of the invalids pulls my name from a hat, none of that preparation will matter when they splash saline on my gushing forehead instead of 1:1000. Still, I have some variation of faith in Tug. He needs to make his money, after all.

Ropes of scars crawl across my chest, the puckers of extracted thread still tinted red. The cuts themselves look healed enough though, and I hope to fuck they won’t split with a hard right. Another round of tape and my left feels stable, ready.

For a flash I see Mona rounding the corner, pills of my cheek dried beneath her fingernails, her dress long and flowing and pristine white. I blink and focus on wrapping my right when her voice sings out.

“Boa sorte, meu guerreiro.”

I tip my head up. She sways back and forth, the hem of her sapphire dress fluttering when she moves.

“A little overdressed, aren’t you?”

She shrugs. “It’s a special night.”

I try to get a read on her intention, on whether Sal coerced her into forcing my hand or if she’s honestly excited for me, but keep getting distracted by the sight of her in that dress. “Right. Forgot.”

She frowns. “That’s the best you can do?”

Tape travels twice around my wrist, knuckles, fist flexing, muscles manipulating flesh. “You’re stunning.”

A short curtsy and she says thank you. “How do you feel?”

I tear the last strip with my teeth, smooth it down and stand, throw a few combinations at the meat locker. I bounce on my toes. “Feel ready.”

“Do you think you’ll win?” Her look isn’t guarded, nor searching. She’s not blank-faced, but doesn’t have any discernible expression. Her face is a non-face. None of this makes me feel any better about Sal’s offer. Not even offer: demand.

I come to rest on my heels, letting her question echo. “I don’t know.”

“I thought you were the best fighter around? Isn’t that what you said?”

I bend down and grab my ankles, not so much to stretch as to avoid her for a moment. I tell her that best is always relative. “It only depends on the night.”

She leans forward, presses her soft lips to my stubbled cheek, inhales through her nose, exhales, inhales again, then pulls back. She leaves a hand on my forearm, her fingers just holding an iced drink it feels like, looks straight into my eyes, into the gray matter behind, the ridges where fantasies of me and her lurk.

“If you’re not the best tonight, don’t get yourself killed.” She squeezes my arm. “If you are, just don’t kill him.”

She gives me a quick kiss on the lips that lingers long after she’s gone.

Making my way down the hallway, I focus on my footwork, keeping my feet moving, never crossing over, skipping around him, staying out of his range. My hands fly in violent bursts, fingers cupped lightly. Waist bends, slips left, dodges right. Elbows drop, pinch in, knock away blade shots and lye fists.

Individual people in the crowd are now visible. From my limited viewpoint, it looks like the warehouse is already full. I throw my fists forward, keep shuffling to the ring.

Clancy snags me before I exit the hallway, lays his hand on my shoulder. In his left is another eggplant bottle. “That little one don’t exist anymore.” When I start to say there is no little one, he shakes his head and repeats himself. “It’s just you and that boy out there. Nothing else exists outside you two. Get it all out of your head, okay?”

I step into the warehouse proper and the sheer volume of people and their noise makes my hair stand on end. Clancy and I make our way down the roped-off gutter from the quarters to the ring. A glass bottle breaks behind me, and it’s nice to know this shit has started already. I look to Clancy and see both his hands are free. Twenty feet from the empty ring, just the tops of heads on the opposite side. I catch a look from the Indian sitting in the crowd. He manages to weakly tip his hat with the arm I’d damaged. I make it to the corner and Shirley comes from around the other side of the ring. He claps my shoulder, asks how I feel.

“I don’t.”

As I climb up into the ring with the light shining down on me and all these people watching, I’m overwhelmed by a crushing loneliness that Mona isn’t here to watch, even just once, to comment on the fluid lines of punches or how muscles striate into stunning geometrics during an uppercut. All of these anonymous faces have seen my primal self, my self stripped bare of all pretensions and defenses, my most honest self. They know more of my soul than my own wife.

And then I see Carissa, sitting in the third row, literally on the edge of her seat. She claps maniacally, her face radiating in some way I’ve never seen. Not like when she sings, nor when she’s removing body parts. Something about it that’s pure, if that’s even the right word for it. Transcendent, maybe. I wink at her and she points, claps harder. Two rows behind her, Tug lounges in a double seat, nods down to her and smirks. I turn to the middle of the ring as the other ropes spread, and into the ring steps Ezekiel.

Shirley grabs me and slaps my face before coating my forehead in petroleum jelly. “Keep moving, keep tight, and don’t get hit.”

“That’s your game plan?”

“You got something better?”

The ref calls for both fighters. I straighten my back walking out. We meet in the center, the ref giving his normal spiel that no one listens to. Ezekiel extends a taped hand to me.

“I been waiting long time for this,” he says. “It’s a privilege to face you, Mr. Marcel.”

I nod, look at his hand enveloping mine. “Same, kid. Same.”

“Don’t you worry. I’m up. I’m all up.”

“Good.” I let my arms hang loose, feel the crowd drift away until it’s only Ezekiel and me, the bare light warming our skin. Our fists wrapped in pristine ceremonial garb. Our brows scarred by other men whose spirits find solace in swollen faces and broken jaws. Who baptize themselves in split cheeks, take the Eucharist of dislodged teeth. Ezekiel shakes my hand again, says best of luck to you, Mr. Marcel.

The bell clangs and his fists are cocked before I can blink. He doesn’t throw one, though, as mine are still at my sides. Instead he nods at them, tells me to raise them and fight.

I take a step back, throw my neck side to side, and flex my fingers. I bring my fists to my face and advance.

His jab sends shockwaves through my chest. My organs vibrate at a low frequency when he lands a cross. I manage to turn at the last second and take most of it on my shoulder. I throw two cheap lefts, neither close to landing, and with my arm extended and torso open, he strikes with a pair of uppercuts.

From the canvas, I can see Sal, sitting half a dozen seats from Carissa. He smiles and claps, as if he’s got me all figured out, and what falls from his mouth is the Gospel we feast upon. Salvadore, the savior. His fucking Christian name is Marshall, so says Clancy. The ref counts five, six. Get up, Ezekiel screams. Sal looks over to Carissa, back to me, claps even harder. I bring my knuckles under me and push myself to my feet. The ring tilts for a second, levels itself. The ref snaps his fingers in front of my face, asks if I can continue. I push him aside, approach Ezekiel.

He is no longer a teenager. His face is wood contoured from years of exposure, his fists like chunks of rock collected in metal nets. I slip a jab and counter with my own, followed by a cross that skips off his shoulder. We circle, keeping to the balls of our feet, bouncing and swaying, staying limber to strike with a quickness, my hip twisting and powering a fist to his face. He eats my knuckle, stumbles back for a second, then rights himself. Smiles, his teeth rimmed red. Quicker now, he steps forward, unleashing a fury of cross-jab combinations. I block the first two—left-right, left-right—but he switches orientation with a preternatural fluidity that I can’t bring my arms over fast enough and my side explodes in colored dots. I hunch over, guarding the area while pushing him away with my left. Let the blood settle before I try to stand and stretch the organs back to their place.

I should go down. Get Carissa free from here. If I were in a position to leave, I wouldn’t be here to begin with.

Cautious short-range jabs protect his face. He circles me, prodding and poking more than attacking. His hesitation opens up two slight windows, enough for me to sink a jab and uppercut into the small bit of soft tissue the boy has. The second one brings a grunt and moan, and the bell rings before he can counter.

Two more rounds and I’ll go down. I can’t handle watching another disintegration like Mona. In my fists is Carissa’s future, the future Mona should’ve had but never will. Two more rounds and I’ll lie down.

Shirley tosses water down my shorts.

“I’m still alert. Christ, save it for later.”

“Just making sure.”

As he tends to the few tape burns on my forehead, I ask for any advice.

“Stay on your feet,” but he says it more like a question than answer.

I look to the side, over to Carissa, whose throat is elongated and flushed red. I imagine her twenty years older, hair a mixture of ash and mahogany, wrists swollen by free drinks.

The bells ring. The punches misshape bodies. The blood leaks and sweat shatters. The rounds pass. He splits my lip with a sharp cross in the third. At the end of the fifth, I sink two shots into the right side of his face. We’re sent to our corners for the break, and I catch Sal leaning over Carissa, whispering in her ear. I squint to see better but can’t decipher her expression. When Ezekiel returns for the sixth, he has a dripping slash below his eyelid. Between every round, I check over to Carissa, who continues to cheer and clap. Two more rounds and I’m done.

At the opening of the ninth, Ezekiel rallies from the bell, unleashing every combination his trainer has ever shown him. Two minutes in, he bursts my chest open with a series of glancing blows, none landing squarely but each with so much power it tears the newborn skin from my body. My chest is slick with blood. He attacks again. I slip each shot, not landing any on him but avoiding him doing serious damage to my body, until I tire for a step too long and he throws an unholy uppercut, knuckle tearing from my navel nearly to my collarbone. As he returns to stance, a crinkled ribbon of skin hangs from his fist.

The ref sends us to our corners. Before I’m even sitting, Shirley’s pressing gauze against me, applying adrenaline and Avitene and rubber cement straight from a glass bottle. I lean back on the rope and my gaze falls to the side. The crowd flickers in and out of focus. I raise my head to look at Carissa even though it feels like the weight will snap my neck in two. The ref calls for us. There’s something resembling a crucified snake on my red-smeared chest.

Shirley puts his hands under my jaw. “You don’t have to go out.”

Balancing on the ropes, I bring myself to my feet.

“Just please don’t get hit in the chest,” he says. “It will not be good. Trust me.”

I approach him in the center. Some dangerous type of euphoria flows through my veins. I lift my hands and they are weightless. They are autonomous, they are someone else’s hands, someone’s I stole with Carissa. One more round.

Ezekiel surveys me as I catalog the damage I’ve done to him: bottom lip split in two and swollen like baby’s arms, an eye that is so black it’s blue with a steady stream of blood flowing over lumps of cement and coagulant, a small lump on his left side, the protruding end of a dislocated rib, an empty black gap between blood-caked teeth where the gum now breathes freely, the ring and pinkie finger of his left hand bent the wrong way. I believe I’m better off than he is because I have all of my teeth, anyway.

Despite all of this, he remains standing. He will not go down until I put him down. I will not go down until he puts me down. For a narrow second, I glance over toward Carissa and Sal and white spots bloom before me. I blink and duck his cross a few inches before it shatters my eye socket. I lash out with a right, pushing him back a step, and advance. He blocks every other punch, parries cross for cross, hook for hook. I feel his nub of rib when I land a quick left and the sound of breath leaving him cuts me. He throws a wild right that clips my jaw, spins me to the side.

We both rise from defensive crouches using anything remaining inside our bodies. Hooks become arcs and jabs fade to pushes as blood and fluids drain from us. He wobbles before throwing a haymaker and I duck down, bring myself up leading with my right and connect with my whole body following. Clear vomit explodes from his mouth, his body curling then tipping, falling. I tumble forward but stay on my feet, stave off darkness to avoid a double KO if nothing else.

He lies crumpled on the floor, his left leg twitching. I crouch forward, lay my hand on his neck to check the steady, if labored, pulse. I crawl to the ropes and work my way to the corner.

The crowd is screaming. Shirley waddles through the rope and pulls me to my feet in a bear hug, throws my arm over his shoulder and drags me to the corner. I flop back against the piling while he tries to patch me up, keep me from losing too many fluids. People in the stands are jumping and screaming, reveling in the after-fight glow, and I search the crowd for more than fifteen seconds before getting a clear view, and see that Carissa’s seat is now empty.

I slump against the meat locker and trace the contour of her face in my palm. The empty seat vibrates in my bones. Sliced wrappings laid beside me, I shudder at the image, her flayed skin draped around a room. Sal leaning over to her. Her screaming and cheering and clapping like a mad monkey.

Something about that look, though. Like she’d known about the conversation the whole time she was back here and refused to bring it up. If she’d known, she certainly wouldn’t have stayed. I caught a glimpse of Sal in the crowd, which doesn’t mean one of his lackeys didn’t nab her, but I can’t remember the last time I saw her. Before the ninth? The seventh? It’s all a blur of adrenaline and dripping blood. She’d have to move quickly. Knowing her, she excused herself to the restroom in the middle of a vicious volley of punches, and snuck out to the alley, on her way to a better, more well-lit stage. She’s gone, but that’s good. That’s what she needed. What I needed.

Using the bench as a lever to pull myself from the floor, I make my way up to Tug’s office. He’s facing the bracket when I walk in. I knock anyway so I won’t surprise him and catch a jumpy-fingered .357.

“Yeah,” he says, waving his hand.

“Came to collect.”

He spins on his heels. “You are one brawling motherfucker. My god, man.”

I shuffle over to his desk and let myself collapse in a chair. My legs throb from the few minutes of walking.

“Jesus, I don’t know if we’ve seen one like that for—since ever, I guess. Shit,” he slurps from a tin, still pacing the brackets, “I get you two in here every other week, we can own half the damn City.”

“I do this twice a month and I’ll be dead next week.” I stretch a cramp from my left shoulder. “I’m thinking about throwing it in after this, just doing one-offs.”

He turns, frowns, and rests his hands on the back of the chair. “You’ll have a title to defend next time.”

“I don’t give a fuck about the title. I get to win and Mona gets her help. This year. That’s all I need.”

“What about your little sweetheart?”

A long exhale, tired of repeating this, but at the same time sad I won’t be doing it any longer. “She’s just a friend, Tug. Just a friend.”

“Don’t know how things happen up your way, but I don’t give a shit how nice my friends’ tits are, I don’t give anybody fifty grand. No. Thank. You.”

My back screams as I sit up. “Who gave her money?”

The chair groans as he plops down. “She said you weren’t going to be moving anytime soon, so she was grabbing it for you.”

“No. She wasn’t grabbing anything for anyone.” I try to jump to my feet but just tip forward.

He crosses his arms over his chest. “How the hell was I supposed to know?”

I grab Tug’s collar with my broken-ass hand, yank him forward, which comes as a little more than a nudge. I enunciate very clearly, make sure he hears every syllable. “Why the fuck would you give someone else the fifty thousand dollars I almost got killed trying to win?”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have been fucking around with girls like that.”

“I wasn’t—” I’m tired of saying it, tired of thinking it, just fucking tired. I collapse back into my chair, listening to the subtle sucking sound of my life imploding. The lingering crowd is a faint murmur. “Do you at least know where she went?”

“She ain’t my problem, Marcel.” He smooths his already wrinkled shirt. “I don’t track what dick goes where.”

Back in my quarters, I pull my supplies from the closet, shove them in my bag. Maudlin and angry or not, a tall bottle of rye will feel my wrath tonight. A vial of Avitene shatters when I grab it too hard. I drop the bag, press on my eye sockets until a rushing pressure overwhelms me, kneel to clean up my mess. At least one of us got out, Marcel.

A shoe beside my hands. “I misspoke earlier.”

I don’t want to ask but do. “About what?”

“If nothing else, tonight says you have to be the best fighter in the City,” Sal says. “Goddamn that was a feat. Maybe you can take it like you used to. Dish it out, too.”

“Yeah.” I laugh to myself, mentally running over my various wounds. “Not for too much longer.”

“Nah,” Sal says. A clank behind me. An axe head beside Sal’s shoe. “Not for too much longer.”

Blades of grass are beginning to peek through the snow. Thin trickles of water that’ll soon be full-on streams. The housed animals poke their snouts from the barn, tasting the crisp air. Winter’s losing its grip, spring bringing us back to life.

I’d forgotten what a marked difference there is between the seasons. In the City proper, it’s scalding and dirty, then cool and grimy, then freezing and barren, then humid and dirty. Even the trees in the park can’t seem to get with the circadian rhythms and only the window-box flowers have the decency to die and clue us in to the natural world. Out here though, a man can breathe. Fresh air burns in my lungs, my capillaries soaking up all this unadulterated oxygen. The scent of wet hay and dirt, strangely similar to that beer the Irish woman gave me. I pivot down the sidewalk, watching for ice patches on my way to the Slaughtered Lamb.

The bar is long and wooden. A smattering of tables around the room, each ringed by simple metal chairs. On the wall hangs a dart-board with no darts.

I pull up to the bar, set my black briefcase at my feet. At least Sal had the decency to give me a briefcase instead of a bag that could double for a big purse. I wait for a moment to get the bartender’s attention, sift through the crowd. Picking out certain faces. Man with kite ears and a smashed nose, are you holding a liver that I need? Woman with a purple rope of scars twisting from below your shirt up into your hairline, will you be needing those feet? Half of me hopes this is Ezekiel’s neck of the woods and he pops in, maybe grabbing some bottles for his father. I could buy him a soda, relive that fight in acute details, feel it for at least another couple minutes. The makeshift ring in the corner brings a fierce longing from my gut. I flex my fingers, motion through two slight combinations.

“What’re you having?” the bartender grunts, her teeth yellow and crooked.

“Couple fingers of rye, you don’t mind.”

She turns to the rows of bottles, pours one in a glass. Up on the top shelf is a purple valise, covered in dust. I ask for a couple ice cubes and lay down some bills. Someone says, Hey, Ma, how’s my tab? A bell rings out.

“What’s with the ring?”

She points behind me. “About to see.”

The man with kite ears and the smashed nose yells, pointing at another man whose shiny face looks shifted down to the right, like it hadn’t finished cooling yet when he stood. Burnt bad, seems, though I can’t tell if the gasoline splashed or was poured. Melted Face puts his palms out, looking down and shaking his head. Screaming blooms in the bar. Kite Ears steps between the ropes, keeps pointing at Melted Face, yelling the whole time. Four men grab Melted Face by various appendages, throw him under the ropes. He jumps to his feet, backs himself into the corner, hands still before his face. A small crowd converges off to the side, shouting bets with money in their hands.

“This happens all the time?”

The bartender wipes down a glass with a rag, sets the smeared glass on the shelf.

A volley of shouts. Kite Ears is in the midst of battering Melted Face. The betting crowd shifts toward the ring, maybe hoping to be anointed with someone’s blood, and as they part, I catch the glimpse of a woman’s silhouette. A jawline I’ve traced a hundred thousand times in my head. A slash of hair I’ve tasted in my memory, lying on the couch healing shattered bones.

I grab my briefcase and drink and swivel through the crowd, displacing those too transfixed by the melted face splitting open to move, sidle up beside her.

“I got ten says the melted guy doesn’t make it another thirty seconds.”

Carissa startles, writes a few notes in her flip booklet like I’m an everyday customer, slowly turns to me.

“The odds aren’t so good on him.”

“They never are.” I flick my head to an empty table, nudge her with the briefcase to say it’s not an invitation.

We weave our way over like a grotesque, broken snake. Drinks clink on the table.

“Looks like you’ve got a good gig out here.” I mime looking around the room, appraising it. “Seems you’re living the life.”

“It’s okay.” She takes bird-like sips from her glass. “I—”

“Why.” I don’t say it like a question, though it is one. It’s more than a question, though, trending toward inquisition.

“Sal was—”

“Why here?”

She says something that’s lost under the shouting crowd. Kite Ears stands above Melted Face, blood streaks over his flattened nose, across his cheeks.

“Things just happen like that, sometimes.”

“Things happen,” I repeat.

“Look, I never asked you to do anything. I’m not the one you should be mad at.”

“You are not a garden,” I say. “You are the scorpion in my garden.”

“You’re overdramatic.”

“You’re—” I start to yell, but rein my voice in. Not that anyone would notice or care, not in a bar where three men are currently carrying the ruined body of a burnt man out of a ring. I just don’t want to let her hear me yell. I take a deep breath, lean in toward her, close enough that I can once again inhale her scent, her hair close enough to taste, to see if my memory is as distorted as I thought. “During the fight. What did Sal say to you?”

“Does it matter?”

“Maybe.” I sip at my drink but it tastes of ash. “Did he tell you what he told me in the Gurney?”

“He said it wasn’t a fight between two men, that it was Greek mythology transcending the heavens.” Her words come out in a rush, something pent up and scratching to get out. “He said that we were in the presence of something holy.”

“Sal said that?” I feel a slight swell inside.

“Sal said that.” She finishes her drink, fidgets with a shard of wood jutting from the table.

I swallow more of mine, say that I didn’t know he could even read.

“Nao me arrependo de nada.” She repeats it again, and though I don’t really know what she’s saying, I feel the blade of memory in my gut, feel her voice twisting through the Gurney, blanketing the street, carrying me through the nights.

I dump the drink down my throat and throw the glass, shattering it on the bell. The crowd perks its ears, looks around. I stand up at our table, point at her and walk toward the ring. Murmuring snakes through the room.

“Marcel?” she says. “Marcel, what the fuck are you doing?” Two men grab her forearms, gentle but firm. She kicks her feet, trying to knock down one of them. “What the fuck?”

I set my briefcase at the corner of the ring, kneel by the bell. I crush the rest of the glass with my heel and roll my knuckles in it, then climb between the ropes. A current of electricity runs through my muscles. Chest expanding, fists hardening. My leg feels normal, regular, until I step and it buckles. I maintain posture, though, flex my fingers and throw a vicious combination. Blood flies from my hands, arcs through the air and splatters on the dirty floor of the ring, mixing with the stain left by the man’s melted face.

The two escort her into the ring, another splitting the ropes for her. She kicks out again, but it looks half-hearted. I let my hands hang by my waist, imagine the ref giving his spiel that no one even listened to, the warehouse crowd dulling to a pinpoint focus.

Carissa stands in the opposite corner, legs trembling, eyes cold and black. Her olive skin is radiant still.

I want to tell her to sing, to fill the air with stories of lovers and family, of impossible dreams seized and exploited. Of foreign cities she should’ve gone to, polished stages she should’ve lit up, dresses made of jewels that should have adorned her. I want to tell her to sing her grandmother’s songs to get me through another night, to make the street before a gambling parlor seem a little less rotten, to fill my head with music and rhythm for the hours in the gym, to score my punches with something lovely.

Blood drips trailing behind me, tiny shards of light reflecting off the glass in my knuckles, I walk to the center of the ring.

I don’t ask if she’s up, or if she’s in. I don’t really give a fuck. Beauty not shared will wither and die.