Broken Hands, Broken Brains

Daniel hadn’t yet celebrated his first victory as an amateur boxer when he got the news from his coach that the man he had fought passed away. There would be no celebration, but a funeral of odd occurrence; the payout: death, and an unlikely statistic. Disillusionment with a lifelong passion, or perhaps, in rare cases, a sick vindication of one’s strength. He had slaughtered the opposition under the banner of a small-time regional promotion, but the remorse burgeoned, even in the absence of light ahead. 

“That left hook was a perfect counter, could’ve happened to anyone, it’s a freak accident…” his coach assured him, consoling him with a hand on his shoulder. They stood outside a bar where they didn’t drink, or partake in any festivities but instead the fortuity of Daniel’s endeavors. He had only suffered minor blows, but the left hook to the man’s temple, a man wearing headgear, a man fighting for personal freedom and two hundred dollars, rendered him in a coma of closing doors; it is luminous, he imagined, like staring into the sun before absolute black. There on the sidewalk, Daniel hardly registered his coach's consolations, and he barely felt the frigid air of a late November. 

“I’m gonna head home, give my mom a call, maybe,” Daniel wished to leave this subject behind and never return, but as his coach took his hand off his shoulder, the guilt compounded within him, and so too his contrition of a once in a lifetime tragedy, wherein the rules were adhered to, and still, a son had been snuffed for the love of the sport. 

“I just wanted to show my support, it’s not every day… it’s not every day something like this happens,” the coach pieced the words together, and they parted ways and toward their vehicles. Sitting in his car, Daniel didn’t turn the ignition, he gazed about the empty roadways—deep in thought, so much so he was thoughtless. With his hands on the wheel, parked beneath a glowing green sign that shined the name Mickey’s, he watched as his coach drove off, and the headlights drifted out of view.

When he arrived at his apartment’s parking lot, exhausted, and ridden with a strange emptiness, the car door clicked behind him. The tenements sat blackened by shadows, or bruises, a heap of ugly brown scarred and in need of condemnation. He lived on the fifth floor, but it might as well have been the hundredth because he walked and walked, waking nobody, and greeted by the same. He heard no whispers or the common squabble between disgruntled husband and wife, and only the elongated creaking of the steps like an untuned piano beneath his feet. When he finally reached the top, stepped to his apartment door, and twisted the key, no dog barked, and no voice was raised: he didn’t have a dog, any animal, human or cat, only silence and grim reminders.

Opening the fridge, he revealed its contents, which were nothing; he wasn’t hungry, just aimless as he stared out the window. His shoes were still on, and he didn’t take them off when he sat on the couch, rigid and sore, contemplating the vastness of the void above, and below, hollowing a hole in his gut. Deeply, he breathed—in and out. Dizzy in a vacuum, he felt the silence upon his skin, but he heard nil of his surroundings, the stagnant room, or the tenants across the hall, not to mention, the outside world, absent from commotion, still as the breezeless night. It was as he considered the TV, and the powering of it on, that he stood again, and back to the window. From his doomed vantage of a vacant parking lot, he watched the streetlights pulsate and listened attentively for the sound of sirens that usually permeated the city… There was no one but him and the morphing of false tranquility, forthright in its metamorphosis of doubt. He had made a mental note of calling his mother, but it faded the longer he studied the parking lot and the carless roads. With a few steps, he was near the TV again, and he thought about sitting down when it hit him—not a notion of any kind, but rather his fist.

Impromptu, with a bludgeoned yet sharp impact, his knuckle clacked against his jaw, and a tooth flew across the room. The pain was nothing compared to the absence of it, so he hit himself even harder. The blood trickled, running down his face, the taste of iron, the splitting of his lip. With his senses nearly reclaimed, he rammed his forehead into a mirror, gasped the air around him, and dropped to his knees on broken glass. His nose was bent and his eyes swollen, his cheek bulbous; he was soaking in the sheer, shooting pain. In this aftermath of his pugilistic, self-inflicting approach, here returned the music from two floors below that played every night, the man above Daniel shouting irately in tongues, and the phone beside him that began to ring, rattling on the coffee table.