Fighting Chance: A Work of Fiction

“Name?”

            “Patrick Kelly O’Flannery.”

            The man standing in front of the barge looked stern, his arms crossed in an intimidating manner. You could tell that the military had created another lifeless member of society. And Patrick was one of them.

            But he was alive. In a few minutes he would be on a ship leaving from France to Camp Devens to be evaluated before returning to reality. Thinking about the process made him feel like a manufactured good on an assembly line. Soldier after soldier, evaluation after evaluation, he would just be another finished product of the Army. The one thing he feared most, however, was being a defect in this assembly line, a malfunction tossed to the side waiting to be thrown away.

            Staring at the ocean the entire voyage home, Patrick begged the moving gray water for a reflection of himself. His identity had been wiped away by the war. More people had arrived in France with Patrick than were returning to America.

            “What’re you staring at, O’Flannery?” one of his fellow soldiers asked in bewilderment.

            “Nothing.”

            At night, Patrick would be haunted by his own demons as his cold body lay motionless in his confined 2x5 ft. bunk. He would wake up sporadically throughout the night in the dampness of sweat and tears, his thick black hair wet as if he had just showered.

            The men sleeping around him would also wake up during the night. They woke up, however, to Patrick’s screams, not their own.

            “It was my fault,” Patrick said as a curious head popped out of the bunk below him.

            “Not this again,” the curious head murmured under his breath as he tried going back to sleep.

            The images played in his mind like an endless reel of film, his friend’s cold, lifeless body lying in front of him.

            “I can still see it,” Patrick whispered to the man who, clearly uninterested in his incoherent state of mind, was trying to go back to sleep.

            “Every second I think about George is another second I wish I could get back with him. He was my only friend going into this thing. George screamed for backup, and I ignored his cries for help. I failed to help him because I was afraid of being shot. I was so—so selfish.”

            The man who had been bothered by Patrick could only provide the same response: there’s no way it could have been solely Patrick’s fault. George was ambushed.

            “Listen, this thing took all of our lives.”

            All of Patrick’s hopes for a return to normalcy were diminished by the death of George. The only thing that maintained Patrick’s last strand of sanity was thinking about seeing his wife again.

            Patrick and Elizabeth would send each other letters back and forth to each other over the course of his year of service. She often sent paper to write on, news clippings from back home in Boston, and a deck cards when necessary. Being an extraordinarily talented artist, Elizabeth would draw pictures of herself and sometimes send them to Patrick with his bi-weekly package. She knew very well that she could just send a photo of herself, but she liked engaging Patrick’s imagination. Having to picture Elizabeth’s long, wavy blonde hair when he saw only mere lines made with a lead pencil. It made his mind think about something other than war.

            The O’Flannery’s had been married for two years, but Patrick began to question whether or not Elizabeth would love the new him. The possibility of not even being able to see her right away because of a failed evaluation at Camp Devens terrified him. Patrick knew that he loved Elizabeth dearly. Would she be able to love and care for a scarred and disheveled man though?

            As the sun began to rise over the horizon and onto Patrick’s glazed eyes and scruffy face, he got out of his bunk and walked outside to find everybody looking off into the distance.

            “Are they trying to find their reflection too?” he thought to himself.

            “We’re home!” collectively exclaimed the group of returning soldiers.

            It took a while for Patrick’s below-than-average eyesight to see the coastline. But when he finally saw it, he wasn’t exclaiming like the rest of the men.

            Now staring at the deck of the barge instead of the shoreline, Patrick began pacing back and forth like a seesaw. Once the barge was docked, he knew it was time to be evaluated. He pictured the process like St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. He was afraid of being denied into heaven.

            The barge docked and Patrick felt as if his body was still shifting though the boat had stopped moving. Men marched down the ramp in two single-file lines and were led inside for evaluation. Patrick positioned himself in line between two of the tallest men from the barge. He wanted to hide from the doctors, but he was aware of the inevitability of his evaluation.

            “Next,” called out a slim man in a white doctor’s coat.

            “Next?”

            Patrick reluctantly stepped forward. His nightmare finally became a reality. This was it.

            The evaluation process included a standard physical and a short interview consisting of a few questions to test for mental illness.

            “OK, sir, I’m just going to take your temperature real quick,” the doctor said as his glasses slowly slid down the bridge of his nose. “There’s this nasty bug going around that we’re trying to detect. Probably nothing too serious though.”

            Patrick abided by the doctor’s requests, doing everything that he told him. An evaluation usually took about five minutes each, but for Patrick, it felt like thirty. The interview portion had not even started and already Patrick believed that there could be a more severe degree to nightmares.

            “Alright, now I’m going to ask you a few quick questions. Can you tell me your name?”

            “Patrick O’Flannery,” he replied in an overconfident manner.

            “And how old are you?”

            “Why twenty-two…”

            Thrown off by these questions, Patrick almost didn’t know how to respond. Was this some sort of trick test?

            “And last of all, how do you feel right now?”

            A bead of sweat slowly traveled from Patrick’s brow down along the side of his nose.

            “Patrick?” the doctor asked, hoping that his patient was still with him mentally.

            After several seconds without a response, Patrick muttered the word “fine” with a soft and muted tone.

            “Welcome back, Patrick.”

            Patrick couldn’t believe that this was all it took to make it back into society. He knew that he probably shouldn’t have passed his evaluation, but he wasn’t going to express his opinion to the doctor. His broad answering of three short questions led him one step closer to Elizabeth.

            He was led down a long narrow corridor and was shown the door. Patrick put his hand over his eyes as the brightness of the harsh, piercing Boston sun welcomed him back home.

            Out of the crowd of people waiting for their loved ones outside of Camp Devens emerged a slim shadow. Though the sun made it difficult to see the shadow’s facial features, Patrick knew it was Elizabeth the second she started racing toward him.

            They didn’t speak a single word. Their embrace spoke a million instead. Those wavy lead lines in Elizabeth’s hair were transformed into radiant blonde hair that shimmered in the sharpness of the November sun.

            “Welcome back, chap,” said Elizabeth’s brother, William, who had driven his sister to Camp Devens.

            William was a gentle man with often very little to offer to a conversation. There was something about him, however, that Patrick always admired.

            Patrick and Elizabeth followed William to his black Dodge Touring car, Patrick’s arm around Elizabeth and tightly gripping her right arm. His face was not quite a smile and not quite a frown. Patrick was happy only to be with Elizabeth again.

            “William just bought this car,” Elizabeth told her husband in an attempt to get some sort of conversation started during the car ride. “And he only got it for $250. Isn’t that right, William?”

            “Yes. That’s right,” replied William. “They reduced the price by ten whole dollars for my two years of service with the Dodge Company.”

            Patrick didn’t say anything. Elizabeth looked back at him in the backseat with his arm resting along the top of the black leather seats, looking out of the car at the moving leafless trees. He turned to find his wife looking at him for any signal of emotion and shot her a forced crooked smile.

            Though William was never the fighting type to enlist himself, he was always curious of Patrick’s activities in the war and hoped to yank some stories out of him now that he was safely back home.

            “So what was it like over there?” William asked bluntly. “Must’ve been pretty damn scary, huh?”

            Elizabeth swung an elbow into the side of her brother for the heedless words that spewed out of his mouth. But William couldn’t control his curiosity. Elizabeth didn’t expect an answer to come out of her husband, but she got one.

            “You want to know what it was like, William? Have you ever been to hell?”

            William didn’t dare look back at Patrick in the backseat. Instead he chose to stare straight ahead at the road.

            “Let me tell you. It isn’t a happy place. One of the soldiers in my division told me to go to hell the other day. Do you know what I told him? I told him I’ve been there before. I have been through all nine circles of hell. And let me tell you, there was no Virgil to save me. Dammit, I even saw Lucifer himself as he took my best friend away. You’re so naïve for a man who’s got three years on me. War deteriorates man day by day. Even after war ends, it will continue to diminish him until he is no more.”

            Nobody in the car spoke. The only noise was the muttering of William’s Dodge and the sound of bumps as its tires drove over the cobblestone road. William repositioned his hands on the steering wheel, tightening his grip.

            “We’re here,” William softly said in a flat tone as he parked to the side of Commonwealth Avenue in front of the O’Flannery’s humble two-story brick house with variegated ivy growing along the sides of it. What Patrick once called “home,” he now called “paradise.”

            William drove off and the O’Flannerys walked up the stoop, and for the first time in over a year, Patrick turned the key to open the front door of his home. Elizabeth hadn’t rearranged the furniture. She hadn’t touched his belongings. She hadn’t even thrown out the food in the fridge that belonged to him. Of course she knew the food would rot, but she wanted to leave the house the way it was before her husband left.

            “Good God, what’s that smell?” Patrick asked in disgust upon entering the kitchen.

            “It’s hard to pinpoint the smell exactly, but it’s probably one of your opened bottles of Yuengling.”

            She told Patrick about her weird habits back home through the letters she sent him overseas. Patrick told her how absurd and ridiculous she was for doing something like that, but he didn’t want to offend her for loving her husband too much.

            “Well I’m home now, so we can get started on some cleaning here,” Patrick said as he grabbed the bottle from the fridge and walked to the waste basket with his arm over his nose.

            Elizabeth couldn’t help but feel embarrassed for her silliness. Her face showed it. But she had heard of a girl down the street who had saved the hairs of her boyfriend’s beard in a Mason jar when he shaved. Surely Elizabeth wasn’t this odd she thought.

            “Looks like we could use some groceries,” Patrick told Elizabeth. “Do you want to come along and get some fresh air? I mean, this house does smell pretty bad.”

            “Uhh…no thank you,” she hesitated as she looked off the side of her body at the floor. “I have to go pick something up at my mother’s.”

            “But that’s nearly ten blocks away. If you had to go you should have had William drive you at least.”

            “Oh, Patrick, I’m a lot tougher than you think,” she said as she gave him a nudge on the side of his arm. “Besides, you said yourself I need some fresh air.”

            “If you insist,” said Patrick.

            This was his go-to line every time he wanted to appease his wife.

            Patrick grabbed his wool coat and flat cap from the closet and gave his wife a kiss on the cheek before leaving.

            “I shall be back in about two hours with dinner,” he told Elizabeth. “I’ll probably stop at the butcher and get a nice steak. You make the absolute best, darling.”

            Patrick had been craving quality meat the entire time he was in France. Everything was rationed out. He, however, resembled Oliver Twist in his division in that he would always ask for more but sadly didn’t get what he wished for.

            It had been quite some time since Patrick walked the streets of Boston. He loved going inside Patty’s Butcher and conversing with Sweeney, a hefty man with thick black hair who Patrick had met when he used to work there as a boy for 25 cents a day.

            Sweeney took Patrick under his wing and showed him everything there is to know about meat, especially what each part of the cow was called. And sometimes, if Patrick put in a good day’s worth of work, he would get to bring half-pound steaks that had gone bad home to his family. Patrick’s mother would scrape the mold off of the meat with a knife and cook it for the family. They never saw any harm in eating bad meat. The only harm that would have been caused was if they had thrown the entire steak in the trash.

            Patrick walked inside of Patty’s and was greeted by a warm grin that stretched from the Pacific to the Atlantic from the same portly man with the dark hair he once knew.

            “Patrick! My god, it’s so good to see you!” Sweeney said as he was tying his apron back on to his waist.

            “Hey, Sweeney,” responded Patrick, showing a little more exuberance than he had when he left Camp Devens.

“Long time no see. What’s it been? Almost two years.”

            “Close to it,” replied Sweeney.

            The two went on talking about each other’s family and social life as customers casually walked in and out with their orders packaged in thick white paper tied together with hemp string. Sweeney questioned Patrick about almost every aspect of his life since the last time he saw him. Except for the war of course. Sweeney knew to never enter that threshold of a soldier’s mentality. He had a mind lacking the ignorance the rest of the community possessed. His eyes weren’t blind to reality.

            “Be sure to say hello to Elizabeth for me,” Sweeney said to Patrick looking at him sympathetically but not enough for him to notice.

            “Sure thing.”

            Patrick left Patty’s with his freshly cut steak wrapped in Sweeney’s signature packaging job everybody in town recognized. And as he left, Sweeney let out a sympathetic sigh as he crossed his bloody arms and looked up at the ceiling, clenching his eyelids shut.

            Before heading back home, Patrick stopped on Vineyard Street to pick up some potatoes from a market stall. He thought this would be the perfect complement to the steak he had just bought. Though he rarely cooked, he knew what foods tasted good together. And steak and potatoes was one of his, if not most, favorite meals.

He paid the woman five cents for three potatoes and headed home.

Patrick opened the door and placed the steak and potatoes on the kitchen table for Elizabeth to prepare.

“How was your mother’s?” asked Patrick.

“My mother’s?” she questioned in a confused tone.

“Didn’t you say you had to go to your mother’s for something?”

“Oh. Oh yeah. That’s right. It was good. She says hello.”

Patrick took a seat at the kitchen table and picked up a copy of an issue of Life magazine with a grizzled old soldier looking down on a child knitting on the cover. He began reading as he waited for Elizabeth to cook dinner, admiring an article written about “Battling” Jim Johnson, a Negro boxer whose fight against Sam Langford in Lowell was cancelled because Johnson had died of pneumonia.

“What a waste of such a great life,” Patrick thought to himself as he sipped on his lager.

He loved fighting. Well, the idea of it at least. Patrick hadn’t been in a physical confrontation until he was sent to the war where the act of fighting was like drinking water.

Dinner was finished and Elizabeth sat down at the table with her husband and the two ate with candles lit. This was a change to Patrick who was now accustomed to only having ten minutes or so to eat meals. Here he was now eating indoors in the privacy of his own home with an unlimited time to eat.

But this time Patrick didn’t eat at all.

A sense of morbidity overcame him, and he suddenly set his fork and knife down next to his plate. He looked down at a piece of helpless meat lying in a pool of blood. It sent Patrick back to France where, like his piece of meat, George laid there helpless drowning in his own blood.

Patrick ran to the bathroom and spewed into the toilet. He turned his head with his hands still clenching the bowl to find Elizabeth standing in the doorway.

Crying fearfully, Patrick whimpered, “Help me.”

Elizabeth approached her husband’s fetal-positioned body and wrapped her arms around him and said, “I can’t help you.”

Patrick looked into his wife’s eyes, and for the first time he saw right through the blues of her iris.

“Only you can help you, Patrick.”

His blank face continued to stare through those baby blues and continued to listen.

“You need to find a release, something to keep you busy. I can’t keep living my life normally and watching you collapse like this.”

Patrick spit the rest of the vomit residue out of his mouth and into the toilet.

“What do I do though? I have no interest in working, and you know I don’t have too many hobbies.”

Elizabeth looked up at the ceiling as she started to think of different niches for her husband but couldn’t think of anything. She had always been able to help Patrick, but ever since he returned from the war, it’d been such a struggle adjusting to this new person.

All of a sudden it hit her.

“What about boxing?”

“Boxing?

“William works with a trainer who prepares amateur boxers for live events down at Matthews Arena. He’s really good apparently. I guess one time he took this guy who was scrawnier than a twig and ended up beating this other fellow who was at least three times—”

“I’ll do it,” Patrick said sharply, cutting off Elizabeth.

Elizabeth left the bathroom. “Perfect, I’ll have William tell his friend you’re interested,” she said as she walked toward the telephone in the kitchen where the lit candles from dinner had now melted into puddles of wax.

Patrick finally stood up from the crouched position that had induced him to lose the two bites of dinner he ate. Staying awake any longer didn’t entice him, for he began to change into his sleeping attire while Elizabeth called her brother.

Laying there like a body paralyzed from the neck down, Patrick just stared at the ceiling alone in bed. The clock read only eight, but his thoughts were racing faster than the hands of time. Why did he tell Elizabeth that he would become a boxer? Was it impulse? Was he trying to shut her up? Patrick loved going to boxing shows before he was sent overseas, but the thought of him in the ring this time made him think twice about the sport. He wasn’t a fighter. Hell, he couldn’t even fight his own emotions. How was he supposed to fight another human being? Patrick thought the same way before joining the army.

***

He woke up the next morning empty-minded and began submitting himself to the stagnation of his daily routine. Glass of water, teeth brushed, clothes put on, paper read. Every morning was exactly the same until the morning there was a knock on the door.

Patrick opened the front door and found a thin yet lean Negro man much shorter than him. The man’s facial expressions seemed to speak for him as he stood there with a serious look on his face. But Patrick initiated the conversation.

“Can I help you?”

“My name’s Tyler. Heard you were interested in a boxing career,” the man who Patrick still considered a stranger said.

“Well I was thinking about it,” Patrick responded with a tone of slight bitterness in his voice.

“No more thinking. Let’s go.”

“Go where?”

“Your training starts now. So sack up, and let’s get moving. I’ve got clothes you can change into where we’re going.”

The two walked about three miles east until they approached what looked like an abandoned storefront. Pieces of wood replaced the glass that was once present in the window frames. Tyler had purchased a bread store that hadn’t done so well financially and stripped all of the machinery out of the building, replacing it with weights and punching bags. Patrick had never seen a place like this before.

“Here, try these gloves on,” Tyler instructed Patrick. “They should fit. Looks like we have about the same size hands.”

Patrick slipped his hands into the gloves. They were snug but comfortable. Tyler assisted him by lacing up his gloves, and Patrick looked at the gloves and balled up his hands into white-knuckled clenched fists.

“I think you’re ready,” Tyler told Patrick. “I’ve never trained a man with a greater look of intensity on his face than yours. Why don’t you show me what you’ve got on that punching bag over there?”

Patrick threw a frenzy of fists at the punching bag with a level of strength that he didn’t know he possessed. He threw all different kinds of punches: jabs, hooks, haymakers, cuts. He didn’t know what they were called. Patrick was just unleashing whatever emotions were built up in his head. His face was red and dripping with sweat.

“You’ve got a lot of potential, Pat,” Tyler told him with confidence and exhilaration. “Go ahead and grab some water, and then we’ll work on dodging.”

Patrick filled his dry mouth with water, and instead of drinking it, he decided to spit it out just to relieve his dry mouth. He walked back to Tyler who was standing with a broad smile. Tyler saw something in Patrick that nobody, not even Elizabeth, saw—hope.

“You’re a good fighter, Pat, but let’s see what happens when there’s another man coming at you doing the same thing.”

Patrick guarded his face with both arms as Tyler began swinging at him.

“When you guard your face like that, it leaves your midsection exposed,” explained Tyler. “You gotta be able to read your opponent’s mind. Get inside my mind, Pat.”

Tyler was bouncing on his loose feet ready to punch. It was a beautiful dance that Patrick found entrancing.

“Where am I gonna go?”

Patrick focused in on his mentor’s eyes, his eyebrows arched trying to read Tyler’s thoughts. Tyler cocked back his shoulder, and his right arm exploded like a bullet leaving the chamber of a gun headed straight for the left side of his target. Patrick sidestepped to his left and the momentum of Tyler’s swing brought his body with it as he missed, looking like Babe Ruth strike out.

“I’d say it’s safe to say we’ll call it a day,” Tyler admitted, trying to catch his breath. “You surprised me today, Pat. Didn’t think you had it in you. And I don’t think you did either.”

“Thanks I guess,” Patrick flatly said.

“Now go home and get some rest. We continue every morning until your first match this Sunday”

“But that’s only a week of training,” exclaimed Patrick. “I’ve never boxed in my life until today.”

“Believe me, Pat, you’re ready.”

Patrick nodded at Tyler, returned his gloves, and started heading home. The wind made his sweat cold, but that didn’t stop him from smiling. It had been the first time he genuinely smiled since returning home. Things finally seemed like they were going to be okay for Patrick. For once, he saw the hope that Tyler had seen in him. He couldn’t wait to go home to Elizabeth and show her how happy he was.

            Patrick found Elizabeth sitting in a chair motionless like a statue with her chin down. The couple’s emotions never seemed to agree with one another. Their relationship was an Italian in an Irish pub. If Elizabeth was happy, Patrick was depressed. If Patrick was happy, Elizabeth was depressed.

            Elizabeth’s legs rest over the arm of the chair with her back slouched against the other arm, her face red as if she had been crying while Patrick was gone. But she always cried when Patrick was gone. However, this time was different.

            “Wh-what’s wrong, honey?” Patrick asked sympathetically.

            She didn’t respond. After several seconds Patrick tried again.

            “Elizabeth, what is wrong?”

            Again, Elizabeth remained speechless.

            “Goddammit, Elizabeth, what’s wrong? Say something! Say anything!”

            “I had an affair.”

            Patrick’s wide eyes moved to the ceiling and shut, trying to comprehend the words that were just spoken. It was like he was preparing for eternal rest. By this point, that was all that he wanted.

            “I’m sorry, Patrick. I’m so sorry,” Elizabeth cried to her husband as she tried to embrace her husband.

            “Don’t touch me with your tainted hands,” spat Patrick. “How could you do this? After everything that I’ve been through.”

            “I was lonely. I didn’t know how to control my emotions. Hell, I didn’t know if you were ever going to come ba—”

            “Don’t spew that bull out of your mouth, Elizabeth. You know very damn well I was going to make it, even if I had to kill every son-of-a-bitch Germ with my own two hands,” Patrick screamed as he watched the spit from his words land on Elizabeth’s face.

            “Patrick, I made a terrible mistake.”

            “Who was the guy?” Patrick murmured.

            “What?”

            “Who was the guy?!”

            “I don’t think that really matters, Patrick.”

            Patrick picked up a vase of flowers off of the kitchen table and hurled it at the wall across the room.

            “Who did you fuck, Elizabeth?!”

            “It was Michael,” Elizabeth confessed. “George’s older brother. He was such a mess when George died that he came over one time, and—”

            “And what?” Patrick interrupted.

            “And it felt right. We were both missing something in our lives, and we just needed to fill the void.”

            Patrick looked at the woman he once loved and cherished so much and was suddenly appalled by her. He looked at her stupid tears. Her stupid mouth. Her stupid hair. Everything he admired about his wife he now loathed.

            “Burn in hell you evil bitch.”

            “I’m so sorry, Patrick. I need you. I love you!”

            Patrick could see the desperation in Elizabeth’s glossy, red eyes. For once, Elizabeth needed Patrick, but she wouldn’t acquire what she now considered to be a delicacy.

            “Love this,” Patrick bitterly said as he spit in the face of his wife and left.

***

He woke up in the old bakery to another morning. Patrick had been living in Tyler’s gym for the past five days unbeknownst to his trainer. Patrick, too proud to ask his friends or parents for a place to stay, removed the boarded up windows with a crowbar, making the November nights colder than usual. His bed consisted of a burlap sack for a blanket and a punching bag for a pillow. He had felt homeless. He was homeless.

Patrick heard what sounded like the front door being unlocked. Tyler walked in and saw Patrick lying in his makeshift bed.

“Boy, what the hell are you doing here?” Tyler asked dumbfounded.

“My wife had an affair with my best friend’s brother,” Patrick stated in a deep voice, his voice cracking and sounding hoarse.

“Listen, pal, this is why you’re doing this. It’s only another reason for you to get out there and show the world what you’re made of,” Tyler said as he sat on the ground with Patrick, putting his arm over his shoulder.

“I know you loved this woman with all of your heart, but you made the right decision in leaving her. Happiness is meant to complement life. Without one of those things, the other ceases to exist. I’m not one to tell you how to live your life, but hear this, buddy, you’re much better off without Elizabeth in your life. Now let’s get going, the big fight is tonight.”

The two left and walked a few blocks to Matthews Arena where there was a crowd of folks already lined up to buy their tickets for the fight.

“Look! It’s Tyler Redding and his fighter O’Flannery!” exclaimed a voice from somewhere buried in the crowd.

This sort of thing was unfamiliar to Patrick. The fact that people now knew of his name made Patrick feel important, like an individual, a member of society with a purpose.

Patrick met the officials and was weighed once he walked inside the stadium. The scale read 175 pounds. It was in the weigh-in room that Patrick saw his opponent for the first time. His name was Emilio Fatucci. He was built in a similar way as Patrick except he had more muscle definition than Patrick.

“Fatucci weighs in at 180,” announced one of the officials.

The team of each fighter walked out to the ring individually with their tin buckets of water, sponges, and towels. Patrick sat on the wooden stool in his corner, his gloves resting on his legs as he waited for his opponent to approach the ring.

Fatucci walked confidently toward the ring with a smile on his face, his jet black hair brushed to the side of his forehead. His gait intimidated Patrick who couldn’t help but make eye contact with his opponent the entire time it took for him to enter.

He made his way to the ring. The referee gathered both fighters to the center of the ropes, and discussed all of the tactics not allowed in the fight: biting, kicking, spitting, etc. The two fighters bumped their gloves together, and the bell rang.

The two danced around the ring waiting for the other person to throw the first punch during the first 30 seconds of the match. Emilio stepped in Patrick’s punching range and attempted to make contact with his chest, but his throw was blocked by Patrick’s arms. Patrick was reading his opponent’s mind just like Tyler had taught him. However, a barrage of shots came at Patrick: jabs, hooks, crosses. He had never seen a man throw off hits as fast as Emilio. Patrick tried to hold his opponent off as best as he could, but he couldn’t stop all of his punches as some made contact with his face.

The first round ended, and Patrick made his way to his corner. His face was bruised, and he had a cut above his left eyebrow. Patrick’s lip also started to bleed, but Tyler and the rest of Patrick’s crew fixed it right up and hydrated his face with a sponge full of water.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Patrick said to Tyler feeling a sense of defeat.

“Don’t say that. Not now,” Tyler retorted. “Think about how far you’ve come and everything that you’ve been through. You can’t give up now.”

Patrick looked at his opponent in the opposite corner. Emilio sat on the stool sweating. In his peripheral, Patrick saw a familiar face in the crowd. He looked closely, squinting his eyes trying to make out who it was.

Patrick’s face turned redder than it already was, and all of a sudden his fatigued appearance changed quickly into that of hatred and dissension.

It was Michael.

The second round started, and Patrick gradually made his way to Fatucci. Patrick’s brows formed a perfect “V”. Emilio swung at Patrick’s bruised and bloodied face with his left arm. Patrick ducked and launched an upper cut with a grunt of exhalation, making full contact with Emilio’s chin.

Fatucci fell to the ground but tried getting up. His balance was thrown off. The trainer in Emilio’s corner grabbed the towel on his shoulder and threw it in the ring, but Patrick wasn’t through with him.

He took off his right glove and planted his body on top of his enemy. Patrick started punching Emilio’s face relentlessly with full force. Tyler and the referee rushed over and tried pulling him back, but Patrick pushed both of them away.

He finished his enemy off with one final elbow to the face and stood over his body. Out of breath, Patrick raised his arm in victory, smiling at Michael as his sweat and blood spilled onto the chest of Emilio’s lifeless body.