1st Place

The Final Round by David Delaney

A fair fight, that’s all he asked for. As Death, personally speaking, I agree. 

There are also small arenas in this world. This was one of them, and I was in attendance. For one struggling fighter, the bright lights flickered for a second in the swirl of blurring images and wobble. He was a middleweight named Mike, the image of a tiger stitched on his robe, and he collapsed like a smashed gourd. 

“Five, Six, Seven...” the referee’s count floated somewhere above the fighter as he drifted down like a child in a swimming pool. Mike had nose-dived into his own splatter. 

I murmured. 

Mike, bashed into fetal shape, smelled cooking and flowers. His mother always had a pot simmering, and every year, in late fall she planted bulbs in the front window box. Gio, her husband, made it for her birthday. She would open the window and lean out, inhale, turn around and announce to their two children, little Mike and Dwain, or anyone else; “today is a beautiful day.” 

The war came. It doesn’t matter which one. Fathers went. And this father didn’t come back. At home, the flowerbox he built held on for a while, but the paint faded, and the wood separated. Death has so many signals. Black robes are for the movies. 

Mike couldn’t swallow through his punched swollen mouth, blood and saliva lisping out, his ear leaking. Dwain was his corner-man, his job, pinching gashes, jamming cotton swabs up Mike’s nose. Tonight he bent over his brother, his kneel cast a shadow across Mike’s gaze fixed on the 

2 canvas. In the lightest thought, Mike’s body sensed how quiet it seems, not at all grasping the surge of feet crowding around his head or Dwain’s screams for the ringside physician. 

Maybe I shouldn’t have come tonight. But here I am. 

I was there when they both were born, too. I’ve been in car wrecks, plane crashes, plagues, the rooms of old aunts and uncles, grandparents and even children-- you name it. For me it can be lightning or slow motion, numbing or nothingness at all. But here, tonight, is something in this place that just doesn’t settle well with me. 

Maybe it’s because of the boys’ father. Years back I watched with, one might say, peculiar disinterest as Gio made his way, too. He was a determined kid. But he lasted not even two minutes on the battlefield. That was it. I see this curly, dark haired youth racing across shattered landscape, hundreds of these young men, scattering like ants kicked from their hill. 

I don’t necessarily angle the cannons or nudge the rake of the machine guns. 

But this young father caught my eye in the sweep. He was slight and swift, his eyes wide with fear, helmet jostling all over. To me he didn’t look like a father of two, he looked like an immigrant kid being chased by a cop. 

But work is work. 

Here at ringside the light is harsh, hot bright; the small building is steamed in red-faced men, cigars, cheap beer. 

This one was not playing out like watching late night TV without the sound. 

I start to move to Mike and I remember these two brothers when they were just little, how they stood behind their mother who braced herself behind the screen door. The official message of her husband drops, and how she crumpled, too. 

So you start over. Grace, that’s her name, she works two jobs and the kids find their way out into the streets. She had a kind look, worn, innocent, in a way. She meets a guy on the night shift, thinks he’s a decent guy, and they get married. Not my department. He turned rough on her, especially on Dwain and Mike. 

This guy knocks the beauty out of these kids and their mother. So one day little Mike fights back, good, too. He hits the old guy so hard he flattens him. Listen to me talk; like he’s mine. 

So it boils down to Mikey or the guy. Mike goes. His brother, too – life begins again. 

The ringside doctor rolls Mike on his back and in the brilliance his stomach shines slick as a perch. Now I start to see through Mike’s eyes better. It’s not as bad as you think. Dwain’s eyes 

3 remain opaque. He has Mikey’s mouthpiece hooked through his fingers; the towel saturated. Dwain can’t blink, either. 

Grace isn’t here. She tried to stop Mikey, then she tried to like his fights. But, last year she stopped coming. Mikey was now just mediocre, at best. Sure, still good enough for a real fight, but not at all capable of moving up. You’d find his name near the bottom of the fight card. So Mikey took the beatings and the paycheck. I felt I had to, how do you say it, “step in.” 

Dwain locked onto the doctor’s detached movements; a penlight to the pupils, a tilt up of the head, the stethoscope to the shiny wet chest. Nothing. The three of them, Mike, his brother and the doctor, not one of them offers a blink. I watch the blue of the tobacco smoke swirling through the lights and hear the other guy already apologizing, saying they should have stopped it. 

Not my call, but they should have. 

I gently assist the doctor’s hand along as he searches. sliding the stethoscope over and around Mike’s heart. Dwain catches the doctor’s deepening brow. Dwain shakes his head and says “no.” I ease back and wait as the doctor moves the stethoscope once more. 

It’s April and her flowers give off that Spring scent. She’s in her housecoat. She opens her window, and another, and pretty soon the small room upfront has the lace curtains sweeping in like those sea fans that gently wave below the surface. Gio whirls the push mower up his tiny yard and that chlorophyll, clover sweet, enters. The world is once again open, dark, rich. I hear Grace faintly singing. She’s off- key. She hangs clothes, clinks a pitcher of lemonade. She will make a pie and the kids and their father will sit out on the step and he will listen as they chatter on and climb about. We watch as the evening unfolds. 

Now it is my turn. I can’t say I wear a smile. It’s almost officious, like that look you get when you pass someone you know twice in the store, or refuse a friend. 

The doctor lowers and cocks his head slightly, his stethoscope positioned dead still. Dwain and the crowd hold their breath. I lean in and whisper into the stainless instrument centered over Mike’s heart, so close only the doctor can hear. 

The doctor blinks, “A pulse.”