The guy was on me then, straddling my waist and hammering his glove into my face. My vision went dark. I’d taken thousands of hits like that before and not one of them ever took away my vision.
His glove. It was weighted.
He hit me again and warmth rushed from my nose. He must have put on a new glove, one with brass sewn inside. He was dirty.
I tried to get up, to hit him again.
“I told you I wasn’t going to lose,” the man rasped.
I heard the ref calling out for him to get off me, that he was supposed to back off. I heard the hush that fell over the crowd.
I looked up at him. He saw it in my eyes.
I wasn’t giving up. This title, the money that came with it, was mine.
He reared back one last time, the ref screaming for him to stop.
He drove his glove into my face, up under my nose, driving the bones straight into my brain.
I collapsed beneath him.
As life faded from my limbs, a single flicker of emotion was felt.
For her. She needed me and I failed. What would happen to her now?
Death swallowed me then, taking what was left of my thoughts, my life. Turns out the moment in which my life was defined forever was not what I expected.
In fact, it seemed that my life was now defined by death.
***
Red.It’s all I could see. It was all around me, everywhere. At this rate I wouldn’t have one drop of blood left in my body. How long did it take someone to bleed out? How long until their organs, their heart had nothing left to fuel them? A minute? Five?
What I couldn’t understand is why I wasn’t in pain. Surely with this much blood pouring out of my skin I would feel some kind of raw pain. But there was nothing.
Nothing but red.
Why was it suddenly so quiet? I could hear nothing—not even the sound of my own breathing. Then I realized. The hush in the air was because everyone was watching me die. They were likely wondering the same thing I had been moments before:How long?I needed to get up, to prove to them that I wasn’t going down like this. I wasn’t going to die in a fight I should have won—a fight that was rightfully mine.
I stopped thinking completely when I practically flew up off the ground. An overwhelming dizziness overcame me, so disorienting and unsettling that my insides buzzed with discomfort.
I was upright, my body springing up so fast that I hadn’t even consciously tried to move it. Still, all I saw was red. How could someone bleed so much and move so fast?
I looked down at myself, taking stock, mentally preparing for the sight of my blood-drenched body…
Only I wasn’t bleeding.
And my body… it wasn’t there.
In the place of skin and bone was nothing but a fine red mist—a red cloud that was shaped like a man—like me.
Tentatively, I reached out my arm (was it really still my arm?) and watched the red mist dissipate like smoke from a cigar.
I must already be dead.
This cloud—this red—was all that was left of me, left of my life?
I looked up, beyond myself, and saw that I wasn’t in the ring anymore. I was in a room. An office. It was large, uncluttered and had a huge row of floor-to-ceiling closets lining the wall behind a massive desk.
