The Knockout Queen

by Rufi Thorpe

I had taken off my clothes and slipped naked into the warm water and swum until I felt erased.

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

knew I could not pass as straight, but I thought perhaps I could pass as “just weird.”

It was about finding a deeper authenticity through artifice, and in that sense it was paradoxical and therefore intoxicating to me.

To tell the

truth by lying. That was at the heart of realness...

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.

She was my best and only friend. We had made ourselves sick eating Funyuns and doing impressions of Johnny Depp together.

This struck me as the quintessential definition of high school best friends from that era.

Bunny was processing what had happened about as well as a congressman responds to a school shooting.

You don’t know what it is to grow up in a country that has only ever been at war. To do active shooter drills in fucking kindergarten. To grow up knowing you’ll never make a living wage.

They couldn’t understand me and it made them want to extinguish me, and Terrence couldn’t understand me and it made him want to save me.

but if I were to give birth to something, I would want it to be an eighty-year-old woman who loved to play bridge.

He was nothing but a floppy, spineless concatenation of wine trivia and pretentious sushi-ordering skills dressed up as a human man and walking around.

What an incredible description

“It’s kind of like long-distance running,” she said. “You have to keep your mind under control. You can’t start thinking about when it’s going to be over or what hurts or you’ll lose it and your form will get sloppy and soon you’ll be winded and you’ll stop before you’ve given it everything you’ve got.”