3rd Place

Milo's Story by Shelby Garnier

As a little boy, Milo never ran away when his parents fought. And he never cried, or intervened. Instead, and unfortunately so, he often watched them claw at eachother with the sharp, grave eyes of a child, rosebud mouth solemn and forehead scrunched in a way that made him seem much, much older than his nine years. He learned many things from these shadow spectator moments. Among them: 

● The smack of flesh on flesh 

● How eyes alone can communicate a challenge 

● The swiftness with which bruises rise to the surface of the skin 

● How cries of pain don’t always sound the same 

● What it feels like to be helpless in the face of something terrible 

It seemed like a particularly cruel irony. The more Milo learned, the more his parents regressed. When Milo turned thirteen, a concerned aunt on his mother’s side took Milo from his house and did not return him. She told him that he was safe now and that it was better to forget his parents ever existed. She said all this while clutching a strand of rosary beads around her neck and crossing herself. 

Years later, at twenty-three, Milo discovered that his father had killed his mother and then shot himself. 

**** Although he would never tell a single soul, this was why Milo became, and remained, a boxing referee: 

The only time he felt something tangible, something worthwhile, was when he was watching two grown men try to metaphorically annihilate each other in a boxing match. Nothing else—sex, drugs, money, whatever—came close to the experience. Milo wasn’t sure why this was, and wasn’t sure that he exactly wanted to know, but he had his speculations. 

Maybe it was the ferocity of it, the way human lips warped into snarls in the midst of battle. How hands turned into weapons. Or maybe it was the sound of it, all smack and slide and stumble of feet. The panting of tired lungs. 

Perhaps it was because the sport demanded attention by its very virtue, forcing respect whenever respect hadn't been freely given. After all, how many times had Milo seen disgust flicker across the faces of audience members, or heard a snapped complaint about the brutality of it all, and yet the viewer, the speaker, still continued to watch? Yes, perhaps that was it. The sport needed no 

one to defend it. It had a unique power all its own and Milo admired that. Who wouldn’t? 

But there was one theory that Milo didn’t like to think about much. It usually crept up on him in the late hours of the night when he was too weary to argue with it. And it always started with the same thought: 

Could I have prevented it? Even now, nearly 17 years after his aunt had taken him from them, Milo still wondered this about his mother and father. And he still had no answers, only the same fuzzy, colorless memories repeating on a loop inside his brain. 

He suspected he would never fully process all that he’d seen and heard. All those moments where he’d been so hopeful that something would change. Mom and Dad would make up this time. Mom and Dad would notice him this time. 

So was that why Milo felt the way he did in the ring? Because it brought him that much closer to their ghosts? Because it felt familiar? 

Was it because he could always intervene if the fighters got too rough with one another? Because they took their cues from him and not the other way around? Or was he simply overthinking things? How would he ever know? 

All Milo understood for certain was this—inside that ring, he didn’t have to speculate about anything. 

And he liked it that way. 

This was the third place entry for the 2020 Writing Competition.