The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe

What else were you supposed to do with pain but polish it until it became something pointy and pretty?

That was how young I was. I thought I would never forget. I didn’t know how things faded, became simple facts, until they were things you hardly thought of anymore.

We needed to pretend violence was something we could control. That if you were good and did the right things, it wouldn’t happen to you.

That was the thing that was turning out to be most difficult about being a person. The people I had the most sympathy for were almost never the ones everyone else felt sympathy for.

I knew that sometimes people found themselves in a moment. They found themselves pressed up against themselves inside of a claustrophobic moment. And you couldn’t see how it really was from the outside.

But sometimes when you are in a moment, it’s so close to your face, reality, it’s pressed up so close to you, that you just flinch, you react, and then your fate is decided, and all you have done was what you couldn’t help doing, and yet your fate is decided. You’ve done something that can’t be taken back.