stickler

by Eric Angal

The kid stands there, shadowboxing in the felt earth. He can hear the creek chuckling to his right. The sky is the color of a ripe persimmon. The sun has already dropped low past the horizon and so there are no shadows. He throws the same combinations over and over again: 1-2-3, 1-2-1-5, 2-3, 4-5-3, 3-body-3-head. He likes throwing the left hook. He likes throwing the right hand and the right hook and, to a lesser extent, the jab and both uppercuts. He likes getting low like Tyson and shifting out left or right to cut a hard angle on his hypothetical opponent. When the opponent gets his wind back and starts throwing punches, he slips, bobs, weaves. He shells up like Mayweather and ducks under the jab and bops the guy with a short right hand straight to the chin. His dad watches from the lawnchair on the patio and nurses a sweating beer and calls to him from time to time and says things like go gettem or keep your hands up. You can’t throw your shoulder out this young, not yet. You can’t hyperextend your elbow or break your hands or nothing like that. Not this young. He’s as soft as clay. He’s got a whole world out there just waiting for him. The world malleable in the same way the boy is. Shifting and changing and endlessly approaching some unachievable terminus of form.

The boy advances under an imaginary slipline. His head movement is spastic and jerky. He pivots out, throws a right hand, extends a long guard to ward off any trouble, then pivots out again, cutting a semicircle in the earth, catching long clods of wet grass under his instep.

You don’t need all that fancy crap, his dad says. The kid ignores him. Another 3. Then another. His father looks on in quiet approval. How is it that there he is, he thinks. None of it makes sense to him. That this boy could be standing before him in the first place, spirited and proud. That the boy would love to fight the same way the father had when he was young. That some things are never learned but simply are. As if all men of shared blood are also apportioned a shared soul.

The kid throws a few more punches and then pivots out again with his arms down. It’s not because he’s tired. He’s waiting for the ten-count. He’s bouncing on the balls of his feet in a neutral corner only he can see. The father, even from this distance, can hear the commentators in their maundering frenzy: and that was a good right hand…and it looks like he’s not going to get back up…and the ref is waving his arms…and it’s over…it’s over…and then the boy raises his hands in exultation, jumps up and down, vaults atop the shoulders of his coach, fist held to God, and it is always this way. In these days which pass and pass again it is always golden like this, and the boy is always victorious.

Photo of Eric Angal

BIO: Eric Angal has previously been published by Nut Hole Publishing, The Argyle Literary Magazine, Don’t Submit, The Gorko Gazette, BRUISER Mag, Eulogy Press, Citywide Lunch, Urban Pigs Press, and The Pixelated Shroud. Eric goes by the handle @MrZoris on Twitter and @erickangal on Substack.