Griffin #2
“Let’s go, stumpy.”
I get up. I’m still unwrapping the elastic bands. We turn around and head back to the locker room.
He takes the thick envelope and slaps it against his palm.
“The sound of success,” he says and recounts the cash, licking his finger to flip through the bills. “The organizer’s happy. The crowd’s happy.” He separates a stack of bills, way less than half the whole wad, and holds it out to me. “I’m happy.”
I take the money. I don’t count it. It’s just paper. Enough to eat, sleep, and wait for the next brawl.
“There we go,” he says, tucking his share into the inner pocket of his jacket. “Let’s celebrate. First round of beers is on me. There are some girls out there who couldn’t take their eyes off you. The new king deserves his queens, don’t you think?”
I finish removing the last wrap of the bandage from my left hand. The skin underneath throbs, wanting to walk away.
Party. Girls. Beer. The holy trinity of testosterone. The celebration is life.
“Why not?” I say with a shrug. A crooked smile pulls at the corner of my swollen mouth. “If the king deserves his queens, who am I to deny the crown?”
Marcus’s face lights up. He doesn’t get the joke. He never does.
The air smells of cheap incense. Cinnamon, vanilla.
Myrrh, I think. Used to embalm the dead years ago, a gift to the baby Jesus, between the cross and the cold body.
The smell of death disguised as ritual, of a sacrifice that was never worth it.
And here I am, breathing it in, in some whore’s room—because it’s red.
Or purple? Fuck it. It’s the way the light hits my eyes.
I lay my head on the pillow. The bed sinks beside me as my company for the night collapses onto the mattress. I don’t even remember her name. Or maybe she never told me. But I think she did. It sounded like a name.
I reach into the pocket of my pants, thrown on the floor. I feel for the crumpled pack of cigarettes.
TOXIC PRODUCT
This product contains toxic substances... blah, blah, blah, death.
QUIT SMOKING: 1-800
Fuck it. I flip the box over, tired of the picture of rotten teeth. After a while, you get used to seeing it and accept that one day they’ll be your rotten teeth, your erectile dysfunction, your fucked-up lungs; and one day it’ll be you wasting away until you die. It’s always been like that for me.
The bed creaks when I move. There’s music in the hallway. An electronic beat, thump. Thump. Thump. Like a dying heart. Nice place, they say.
She says something. I don’t hear it. She’s some woman who watched me and lost her money betting on Rat. She calls me a “hero”, a “savage”. I don’t know which is worse. Said she bet on me, lied right to my face.
Sex is just another way to shut off the brain. It’s like pain. Like adrenaline. It works.
I distance myself from this reality because my head is stuck in the now.
Used to the idea that my actions dig my grave little by little, and my future self won’t be alive to deal with the consequences.
I run my hand through my own sweat-damp hair and choose to blow smoke and just enjoy the nicotine.
My fingers brush against the chain around my neck, and I push the thought of Seraphim away.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” she says.
I exhale smoke toward the ceiling. “Does it matter?”
“No... it’s just... you fight differently.
” She props herself up on an elbow to look at me.
I don’t look back. Rule number one: eyes have people inside them.
And people feel things, want things. I don’t want to know what she really wants.
“It’s brutal, but it’s... beautiful. Your body.
.. it looks like it was sculpted for this. For war.”
I remember the first time someone told me the body was a temple. Seraphim told me that, with blood in his mouth and his eyes burning. “Every temple needs a sacrifice.” It was before he stuck the knife in someone. Or was it in me? Sometimes I get this confused.
She looks at me. My face, my body. My shoulders. I know where this is going.
“Must’ve been fucked up, losing that,” she says. “Your arm.”
She touches my shoulder.
I pull away.
Everyone thinks suffering is a turn-on. Some say it outright. Others hide it behind pretty words: overcoming, resilience, strength. But deep down, it’s all about getting off on watching a tragedy and cumming to the idea that it produced something useful.
“Sorry. I just meant that...”
That the trauma made me stronger?
Go on. Say it.
“It’s just that there’s something about you... like... I don’t know. You have this... survivor thing. Like nothing can stop you. Like every wound just makes you more...”
“More what?”
She hesitates.
“More badass,” she says, laughing, embarrassed. “Stronger.”
I stub out the cigarette on the floor. I sit up. Look at her. She shrinks a little.
“You think that’s sexy?”
“That’s not what I meant—“
“Tell the truth.”
She swallows hard and gives a nervous little laugh.
“Maybe a little...”
It’s emotional pornography.
Seeing the wound up close, licking the dried blood, touching the exposed bone, and telling me I’m beautiful like this: beautiful in spite of it, beautiful because of it.
It means you’re the freak in the center ring and the living reminder that someone is more fucked up than they are.
They see a hole, they think they can fuck it.
I stand up. The bed groans.
I grab my pants, pull them on without rushing. I tuck the chain with its oxidized medallion under the collar of my shirt.
“You should get some help.”
“It was just an opinion...”
“Yeah,” I say.
Marcus was right. I should’ve called a professional, someone who knows when to shut up.
Outside, the music still pulses in the hallway.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
A rat’s heart on the verge of death.