Salivating

The fighter tastes sweat with the faintest tint of leather. Not the worn leather of a jacket, softened by smoking cigarettes with muscled backs pressed to brick walls, but the sharp violent leather of eight ounce gloves just begging to find flesh; and that’s rather a lot of words to describe anything in that first sentence, but fight-sweat is complex and so is leather when you get down to sticks.

He had a name but didn't particularly need one, a name was just something to whisper or scream or condemn, none of these actions particularly novel. His gloves (which gave his sweat its flavor) were either red or black, as blood is red or black, but he did not notice. His disinterest was not directed at gloves, or colors in a particular way. He didn't see colors, you see. Not really.

He could distinguish between them, and that's a fact, but his was a drunkard's palate. People generally thought about color too much. Their eyes would flit around to catch a stranger's, to catalogue some hint of yellow or a sapphire's blue. It is always tempting, before a fight, to think in more grandiose diction, to muck about with words like Crimson and Raven, but it really doesn't quite matter what color blood is.

Bits of life of any color leave a stain that a connoisseur would find... distracting. Far better that a commoner take the ring, his shepherd's accent restrained, always quick to assent to conditions with no regards to their absurdity or extravagance. No one thought him the rube, though; he rarely spoke in any case. And speaking of unspecified cases, his particular case was one in which if you never lost you were never criticized, as if one were a prophet with pinpoint accuracy and a relatively peaceful alternative religion. He was sure that an ancient Asian man had commented on how one deed could unmake an emperor, and it made him wonder if the people really had been so dull as to need such an auspicious guru.

There were a lot of people being born, and so words were bound to be repeated even if they weren’t very useful. He was not sure why the unspecified ancient Asian of previous mention would have theoretically talked about emperors and not sultans or tsars; he supposed that familiarity with the other types of despot would lead to at least two new famous Asian thinkers to think famous phrases, and that's without all the pseudo-titles like "pontiff" or "Lord of all the Animals of Africa" thrown in, and every one as good as the other.

No word ends up being more important than the other when you get down to sticks. He liked that phrase and felt marginally certain that he had coined it. He didn't know if anyone else used it, though he supposed that, sticks being a common word and all, the phrase had been at least given a whirl by the drunk laying near the pile of burning tires after graduation. His assigned meaning was related to a condition so primal as to indicate that the weapon you held was the last thing on earth more deadly than your bare hands.

Not to knock bare hands, fractured skulls and crushed vertebrae tell few lies, but that last weapon really can make all the difference. It is certainly nicer than nothing; it is heaven's comfort to the bruised and battered. He thought that being able to use whatever was around you was a good goal, but that specific applications would require prohibitive amounts of time.

If he had wanted any other life, he would have wanted to be samurai. When life is so cheap that they sell it by the boatload to cruel men, being samurai would be the cure. He had read that samurai could take on countless amateur fighters, like that blonde in the slasher movie did. He could be a weaver of blood, an illusionist who spun the soul out of its core, a man who was remembered.

But being remembered might not be such a great payoff in the long run. He could just say "Fuck it, Archie, I'm out," and bite the tape sealing his hands to that goddamn set of black or red leather gloves. There are less dignified ways to hear the final bell, to be sure.

But no one in his staff was named Archie, so a different, more appropriate proper noun should be chosen. And then what if his egress was blocked by some unseen foe? Would the faceless men with cameras and microphones turn on him? Furthermore, what if he couldn't bite the tape off because he put his mouthpiece in early to avoid talking to people, and one cannot just spit one's mouthpiece into someone else's tunnel, it's not hygienic...

He wondered if his fixation on the whole blood thing had been distracting, as though it were his permanent theme. He didn't want to make that impression, in point of fact his last fight he had considered something more succulent, like the way an apple sounds when you bite it, or something of that order, but blood really was as good a trope as any.

He wondered what the other man's name was, and secretly hoped that his adversary was also known as "The Dragon" or something like that. Then, after he won and was sitting at some bar or the other looking disinterested in the whole scene, the pretty girl (who, after all, is very nearly always going to be present in such circumstances) would walk over to compliment his win. He would respond, "The problem with being a dragon is that there is always a slayer," and she would laugh, her sapphire sparkling unnoticed.

Did he really produce a canned response to offer a pretty girl just in case one was around after he presumably won the fight with whomever it was that he was fighting and that opponent happened to occasionally be called The Dragon? He took no responsibility for this, the tunnel was too long and his urge to make a bad joke had been suppressed for an admirable amount of time.

The lights hit his eyes and they pulsed, green as Medea herself, and he was relieved that there would not be much more thinking required. He wondered if The Dragon (he had decided it should be his rival's name even though it was very probably not) was more skilled than he was, was stronger than he was, and if he preferred penne or linguini when asked point-blank.

His saliva dripped and hit his glove and like a current that old black magic was coursing in his veins. So there's blood, again, and he wondered if he should have hired a guy named Archie instead of hitting tractor tires with sledgehammers, but what's done is done.

Ding Ding Ding.