Broken Hands, Broken Brains

Broken Hands, Broken Brains

By James Edward Culley

Daniel hadn’t even celebrated his first victory as an amateur boxer when he’d gotten the news that the man he’d fought had 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 had said, consoling him with a hand on his shoulder. They stood outside a bar where they didn’t drink, didn’t partake in any festivities, but instead pondered on the ill-fated nature of Daniel’s endeavors. 

He had only suffered minor blows, but the left hook to his opponent’s temple–a man wearing headgear, a man fighting for personal freedom and two hundred dollars–had rendered him in a coma of closing doors; it was 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 did his contrition at a once-in-a-lifetime tragedy, wherein the rules were adhered to and still, a son had been snuffed out 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 out at the empty roadways, deep in thought, so much so that he was thoughtless. With his hands on the wheel, the car parked beneath a glowing green sign that shined with the name “Mickey’s”, he watched as his coach drove off, and the headlights disappeared from 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, only the elongated creaking of the steps like an untuned piano beneath his feet. 

Finally reaching the top, he stepped up to his apartment door and twisted the key. No dog barked, and no voice was raised. He didn’t have a dog, and there was no one there to greet him. There was only silence and grim reminders.

Opening the fridge, he revealed its contents, which were nothing; he wasn’t hungry, just numb as he aimlessly stared out the window. His shoes were still on; 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 sting his skin, hearing nothing of his surroundings—the stagnant room, the tenants across the hall, the outside world—it was a still, breezeless night.

It was as he considered the TV—turning it on—that he stood again, walking back to the window. From his doomed vantage point overlooking the vacant parking lot, he watched the streetlights pulsate, listening for the wailing of the sirens that usually permeated the city. There was no one, no one but him and the morphing of false tranquility, forthright in its metamorphosis to 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 just as he was about to sit down, it hit him—not a thought, or a notion, but his fist. Abruptly, and with a sharp impact, his knuckle clacked against his jaw, and a tooth flew across the room. The pain, nothing compared to the absence of it, wasn’t enough, and so he hit himself even harder. The blood trickled, running down his face, and he tasted the iron, felt the splitting of his lip. With his senses nearly reclaimed, he rammed his forehead into a mirror, gasping as he dropped to his knees on the broken glass. His nose was bent and his eyes were swollen, his cheek was bulbous. He sat, soaking in the pain. 

It was in the aftermath of his pugilistic, self-inflicting approach that the music, played every night from the flat two floors below, began. As the tenant above Daniel started shouting in tongues, the phone beside him began to ring, rattling on the coffee table.