The Opponent

Chest heaving, fish mouth gasping for air. Jaw tight, arms heavy. Sweat drops down ribs. Clench fists, rewrap rags around coarse palms. Rub swollen tongue, bloated from thirst, across teeth: two broken. With deep breaths, I suck the hot air from its humid expanses of the surrounding forest fire’s clouds. I want to explode from my body.

I turn around. He’s waiting for me, hopping lightly, jabbing his feet into the scorched dust. He wipes the sweat from his forehead, smearing the dirt and sweat into muddy streaks across his temples. The men surround us, drinks in hands, cheap beer sloshing and slovenly faces dripping with laughter, occasional arms around women with layers of fat bulging over skirt waistbands. Fleshy faces grinning from all sides, red light from lamps pricking through the shifting crowd, stabbing at the makeshift arena. The crowd surrounds us, throbbing with a feral hunger for the satisfaction that will elude their gluttony and fabricated lust.

His left eye is a slit after not ducking quickly enough. He levels his head down, fixes on me a deadened stare. A man shoves me roughly from behind. I stagger into the circle drawn in the dirt. I grit my teeth, and all else outside the ring blurs together in a tandem of lurid colors. Only my opponent remains.

He snarls, a jagged expanse of sound shoved through a tiny orifice of a mouth. Sunburnt lips, tiny pieces of flesh hanging off that tremble as he breathes in and out, leering at me. He’s missing a tooth, towards the back of his mouth. His eyes glaze with a feral fear. His pupils are huge. He’s backed into corner, half starved and desperate. At the outer edge of the crowd surrounding us, seething in harlequin breath and drunken eyes, a man drops a bread crust. The boy’s eyes flicker to the ground, and in that instant I hurl myself at his knees.

He’s down, and I’m on top of him. I scrabble around on the ground with one hand, holding his squirming frame down with another. Throat to fist, knee crushing his chest. I can feel him gasping for breath beneath me. He must be twenty pounds lighter than I. My hand grazes a rock, and I clench it in my fist and punch him in the nose, an uppercut that I hope will break nostril bone all the way through into brainflesh. I swing again, hand tightening on his throat. I feel the soft tendons, warm, twitching muscles as he tries to shift from my grip. His bulging lip, already bruised, splits. Blood drips fast down his chin, and his tongue peers out, dabbing just below the lip, feeling for damage. A hand of his escapes my grasp, and I bite it, catching three whirling fingers throbbing against my tongue.

He squirms. The crowd jeers, shoves for a better view. A man throws his heavy glass beer mug at us. It bounces once, rolls, and comes to a stop at my feet. The crowd cheers. I don’t know what to do. The boy mutters, spittle dangling from chapped lip corners, entwining in small rivers with the blood streaming from mouth to chin to neck, onto my hand.

The boy hoists a fading sigh, a pale flag of defeat from between scabbed lips, and I punch him in the face a final time, turning my wrist at the last second to split cheek bone. His face caves and the crowd heaves a murky, riotous cheer, brawling and insatiable.

A drunken ancient raises my arm; I’ve won. The men hand me bread, offer me a mug. The drink burns down my throat, settles heavily in the dark recesses of my stomach. The girl ties up the helpless boy in knots, tearing cloth from her grey skirt strip by strip, and leaves him facedown in a puddle to drown.

The stone in my hand is warm with his blood, and I unclench my fist and let it fall to the ground. The men warmly and drunkenly shake my hand. The lewd women smear their rouge across my cheeks in warm breasted hugs, enveloping, tight, motherly. My father stands at the edge, the only sober set of eyes. I hand him a piece of bread, he accepts a man’s whiskey glass handshake, and we walk away.