Headshot

by Rita Bullwinkel

It was not as if women’s boxing was, or ever had, or ever would be something respected enough to put every ounce of your energy into.

The coaches really are useless, like stoned older brothers getting paid by their parents to chaperone a middle school dance.

Artemis resents this identity, too, or, rather, wants something more powerful that she can control herself, that she is able to make and look at and hold.

You can’t train for a sport unless you believe you have control over your own destiny. The point of training is to change the outcome of the future. You train to change something you otherwise would have lost.

If desperation won boxing matches, Andi would be the victor by pounds and liters.

Rachel had a theory about other humans: people are the most scared by what makes zero sense to them but that they cannot, no matter how they try, avoid.

That’s the thing with children. So often what they do, or what they think they should do, or what they think they are good at is just some product of something someone told them that they would be good at.

There is no use in fighting someone who doesn’t have their heart in it.

It’s the worlds that they’ve built to box in. It’s the way they look at their own reflections.

When Rose Mueller and Tanya Maw box, the kidney beans pulse and leak all over their minds.

A life taken over can be wonderful. But it can also be sappy and stupid and dramatic. A play directed by God is many people’s stage of choice.

They are accelerating away from death with speed and precision. Immortality wafts off of them. Even the dullest of the judges can feel that the girls are not quite human.

The people in mass with her are what make her the least sure of God’s existence.

It’s as if the social failures of the past—one’s inability to, as a child, navigate one’s peers enough to escape torture—help hone a superpower of acute sensitivity to people over time.

It will be water that destroys the world’s last handwritten scripts.

There are people who, just by looking at disasters, implicate themselves in the violence at hand. These people, the self-implicating people, are far less likely to be victors, but they are more emotionally intelligent, and more likely to be able to see details that others might miss.

Even though only Rachel Doricko and Rose Mueller are in the ring, Sam keeps thinking he sees the shadows of the other girl boxers.

Girls are born with all of the eggs they will ever make. Tiny future fighters are nested inside the infant bodies of baby girls. Men are dead ends, but girls are infinite backwards and forwards.

SLAYYY