Punch
15 Minute Flash
image: zerbini, luis
People punch. They punch down and around. They go for the gut, waist, lip, belt-line. They buckle your damn knees. The boy punched the gum out of life. Like biting your lip. He knew right where the end was, and kept it there, till life burst into some simple image. There was one time he caught a young stud so hard in the mouth one night he woke up in a honey ditch with stickiness and dew all over his eyes. The stickiness was everywhere. It was so everywhere it was up in the pines that flew over the border of the Carolinas, where the light likes to get all lazy, and drunk. Like real lazy. Lazy, like the way bored and young hands like to wander south on midsummer days. Hands that know the weight of summer’s breath and the sweet skin on moss floors. Hands that know the sticky edges of pocket lines and jean skirts. Hands that knew the pressure and sound when the life of spongy leather belts separate into twos and the sound that comes after in song. He had hands that stuck. At 7 he almost went blind from it. Hours it took him to get out of that spider web where his hands got wet from rolling and sticking empty matter into form as he slowly saw the white. He never did it. Her dress always fell branches and kissed flowers. Even after all the years of running through the woods after school. Tripping over wet roots, and soaking his vans on moss floors, he never did catch her. He just slowly, and slowly, rocked into the white. When they got married, shortly after graduating, on their wedding night he ventured down to the lake that sat behind their small two room cabin. On its edge he sat on a rock and took off his shoes and socks, his linen shirt, and tie. He wrapped them into a ball and then chunked them as far as he could into the silver lit water in front of him. The silver line that swallowed up his personhood, cut across the lake. It looked like a razor, its edge gleamed from the moon that hung above. It made him remember how for days he used a butter knife on his face and arms after running into that spider web. He would lay in bed swearing on Jesus that there was a single, white, strand still on him. Married to his flesh like melted fishing line. He remembered how he would run over it a million times, each stroke catching, and then snagging, as it hooked deeper and deeper into his skin, his mind, into his heart.
They said he was the best damn drummer in the southeast. They said it was branded into him, like preeminence, because he knew how to stay there, in that pocket, canoeing the ever-living-shit out of it till there was nothing but blue and the endless nothing, like cold beer on glass. He would just just stay there and take it. He would just take it, and take it, and not give a shit. He would just say there man like he was patience. Sammy saw. He saw like a blind man with a knife between his teeth. Running. Running like God as a fool till a twig or a rock finds him. Sammy saw.