Mrs. Wilkshire was wasting no time today. Within seconds of entering the grocery store, she spotted Jim-Jim sweeping the floor and growled with bloodlust. “If you don’t want a jab to the throat, you better put your knuckles up!” She came barreling down aisle three, throwing her stiff, bony body between each advancing foot. Jim-Jim tried to scope out where to lay his broom. He had about five seconds before she got within ballistic range and he didn’t want her to trip.
“Look lively!” she cried, and the volley of fists began. One, two, one, two, quick as whips but light as hail. Jim-Jim raised his forearms defensively. There wasn’t much weight behind her fists. He knew the real threat was her leg game. For an aging woman with a propulsive gait, she was shockingly capable of pivoting the whole of her body for a shin swing that left dead zone bruises for weeks. Jim-Jim didn’t want to be sore all afternoon. He wanted to go swimming.
Thwack. She got him clean on the left temple. He spun, falling into the candy bars. Mrs. Wilkshire yawped, twirling another roundhouse. Jim-Jim rolled out of the way, York Peppermint Patties flying everywhere.
“Careful there, Jim-Jim,” lectured his manager Devin from over by the freezer. Jim-Jim picked himself up from the dusty floor. He should’ve tanked the hit, he knew. Less of a mess that way. He was just having a bad morning.
“Careful there!” Mrs. Wilkshire sneered, gyrating another leg bomb. Jim-Jim winced and let the blow strike him in the sternum, knocking the wind right out of him. He hit the cold tile and laid there, hands up in surrender. Mrs. Wilkshire was giddy. She hadn’t won a fight in weeks.
“Need to work on your offense,” she observed as he rang up her purchase of fruit bars and bubblegum. He looked up from the register, struggling to contain his frustration. She smiled. “Just my two cents.”
Devin came by, lugging a box of chocolate milk jugs. “My Nana’s right, man. You gotta try harder than that if you ever wanna win one. Shit’s sad.”
Jim-Jim counted the coins in the till, ignoring Devin.
At the end of his shift, he got his bike from the back locker and set off down the road, the late afternoon sunlight glowing clementine. By the flower shop, Bev Jackson and Harry Stant grappled in the tall grass. Video Store Mary waved and smiled through a split lip at Jim-Jim as a trumpeter played Satchmo in the park. Summer was around the bend.
Behind the mini-mall on 14th and Forest ran an asphalt spiral that once connected to the now-shuttered highway rest stop just off Exit 23. Jim-Jim glided down the old road to its conclusion: the best unsung swimming hole on the local river. A group of kids were up on the nearby hilly overlook, bikes all in a pile. Jim-Jim parked his in a distant bush and went to take his shirt off.
“Hit him back! C’mon!” rang a tiny voice from above.
Jim-Jim sighed. The light of the afternoon glimmered on the water.
“This an assigned fight?” Jim-Jim asked, climbing up the hillside. Two kids, covered in dirt, circled each other in a clearing. Around them, a gaggle of friends goaded them on, some on the ground, others up in the branches like squirrels.
“So what if it isn’t?” asked one.
Jim-Jim looked at the brawlers. The little one was skittish, with freakishly sharp knuckles. The larger one was husky, soft, eyes hiding under curly bangs.
“What’s the point of this?” Jim-Jim asked.
“We wanna be ready, y’know. For when we’re old enough,” said one onlooker.
The cheer was taken up by others. “Yeah. We wanna kick ass!”
Jim-Jim’s blood pressure spiked. “There’s no point. Go do flips or somethin’.”
The kid with the hook knuckles stopped bouncing on his feet. “Like you’d know.”
“What did you just say?”
“Everyone in town knows you’re a weakling. They hate fighting you because you don’t even try. Takes the fun out of it.”
“My dad said it’s like humping a couch!”
The children in the branches laughed.
Jim-Jim heard his old man’s voice running like a tape in his skull. A good fight keeps you honest, win or lose. It’s that or be scared your whole damn life, waiting for your comeuppance. He could still see his dad’s shit-eating grin parting the blood of his broken nose as he offered up fatherly advice. It was the year he helped start the town tradition of assigned daily fistfights, twenty years before it was enshrined in county by-laws. Always said it was the “one great deed” of his life.
“I can fight better than anyone,” Jim-Jim said.
Another laugh from the peanut gallery. The twitchy one smirked. “Prove it.”
A blur of blue shorts, and the little one was on him. Jim-Jim groaned as the kid beamed him on the torso right where Mrs. Wilkshire had struck. He knew to twist his fists as they landed so the skin popped open. Jim-Jim shoved him backwards on instinct, sending him flying towards the treeline.
“What the hell, kid?” Jim Jim shouted. “You can’t fight like that, you’re gonna really hurt somebody!”
The gremlin stood up giggling. “That’s the point, doofus.”
Jim-Jim’s skin went clammy. He looked again at the children in the periphery, at the wild dark dim of their eyes. They were all around him, smiling and laughing, cracking their matchstick bones as they climbed down from the branches. He turned to face the curly-haired dope. He was staring cow-eyed right back at Jim-Jim, swaying with his limp fists still raised up near his face. He didn’t look sad or angry or really even scared at all, just a baby rhino in a zoo surrounded by stone walls. He looked far away.
The others came in all at once, led by Blue Shorts. Jim-Jim fortified his guard but there’s only so much you can do. He felt his legs give out beneath him as the little kicks and fists fell on him like rain. After a minute or two, it stopped. There was some laughing and a bit of spit and they were gone.
He was numb all over but pretty sure from experience that he was fine. He sat up, ears ringing, and walked himself over to the river. The chill felt nice as he washed off the dirt and the blood of the day.
Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a blur in the tree line. It was the dope kid, the fighter.
“What’s up?” Jim-Jim called out.
The kid looked unsure.
“Your friends don’t fight fair, y’know. It’s not supposed to be like that.” A pause. “They’ll figure it out eventually.”
“How do you deal with the pain?” the kid asked.
Jim-Jim laughed, feeling the band of pressure on his ribs. “You get used to it.”
The kid got angry. “Why? That’s stupid.”
“Hm,” Jim-Jim muttered. He couldn’t remember the last time he heard anyone talk about the pain.
“Why haven’t you left yet?” the kid asked.
“Huh?”
“Why do you still live here?”
Jim-Jim thought of his dad in the last few years of his life, after he got paralyzed from the waist down. How he took up ambushing Jim-Jim with grapples and body drops from the second floor railing. Sometimes he would miss and bounce like a ragdoll. It never stopped him from trying.
Jim-Jim saw his father again on his deathbed, laughing it up with the guy who’d snapped his spine like asparagus. He had seemed small in that hospital bed. Small, sharp and feral until the end. All Jim-Jim could remember from that long last day was the beep of the machine and feeling that it couldn’t have been any different. It had to be this. Just the way of the world, Jim-Jim. Rules of the game.
“It didn’t use to be like this, y’know,” he replied to the kid, trying to hide his shivering. “This honorless shit. There are still good, friendly people here.”
The kid’s eyes slipped behind his curly bangs. “But they let it keep happening.”
“Yeah. They do.” He sighed. “I do.”
“Why?”
A pause.
“Because I’ve never run away from a fight,” Jim-Jim boasted, trying to convince himself, trying not to disappear. “Because I’m gonna make them hate it. The whole dumb tradition, what it’s doing to us. I’m gonna beat it. I’m gonna win.”
The kid kicked a pebble in the water. They stood there silent as the glow of the sun began slipping behind the tree line.
Jim-Jim couldn’t help himself. “Because I love it here. It’s really beautiful.”
JOHN CHROSTEK
John is a writer in Richmond, VA. He's the EIC of the new weird/genre magazine Cold Signal. Find his recent stories at X-R-A-Y, Hex Literary, HAD, and on his website below.