Defeat

Darkness. Complete darkness and I can’t see a thing. He managed to land some powder in both pupils and it rendered my visual processing useless. I swung blindly into the night and gasps of the cold air invaded my lungs.

Panic. My teeth are gritted together in a compound of anger and pure frustration. I want to scream but I hold it in, secretly hoping my opponent will lose my position in the darkness if I keep quiet. But is it this dark out for everybody? My eyes, after all, are on strike. My mind lays down the blueprints to this particular back alley and I try to use that and kinesthetic memory to get out of the streetlight. Am I in the streetlight?

Pain. A crushing blow to the back of my head and I feel like gravity has been confiscated from the Earth as I lose all weight. Or did I lose weight?

Bam. Gravity is still here, sending me reassurance in the sense that I am sprawled out on the street. My knees and the palms of my hands are scraped up and I can feel blood begin to trickle from any of the asphalt’s penetration. I grope around and feel my way to a wall, using it to help me to my feet. I feel a swift blow to the back of my left knee and my leg buckles underneath me. Again I am on the ground. This time I roll over onto my back and wait. With the way things are going I’ll accomplish nothing by trying to stand up; maybe I can play some sort of possum and catch an attempted stomp and feel where my foe stands. With that knowledge I could form an offense.

Horror. A stomp comes to my face and I fear my features to be disfigured. And if they weren’t with that first stomp, the next few definitely took a toll.
Salvation. I catch one of the multiple stomps to my face and twist the man’s ankle in such a way that I’m satisfied with thinking it may be broken. I hear a scream of pain. I smile as I feel the pain electrify through his body, like a shockwave, up his leg and infecting him like a disease as he collapses in surrender.

Strength. I’m overcome with more power than I’d ever thought it possible for my being to harness. I get to my knees and tower over where the crippled body should be. I know he is there, I can feel the heat of his life right in front of me. A picture of my enemy forms in my head with his hands up, admitting defeat, and a face that pleads for mercy. I shake the fantasy from my mind, knowing that this bastard has a beating coming. Mercy? I forget the word’s meaning.

Grin. “My turn,” I say in a ghastly whisper. The whisper you hear in a graveyard, the whisper of death. I cock my strong arm back and deliver the preliminary blow, feeling the thickness of human skull as I connect. That thickness is no match for my battering ram of anger and I trounce the castle’s drawbridge. It’s a fury of lefts and rights, swinging forwards and backwards and any other ‘wards’ that exist – even ‘wards’ that don’t exist. I feel the warm of his life being replaced with the cold stain of blood splashing about, marking my clothes and my flesh.

Disbelief. A thud is what I hear before I get that lightweight feeling again. As I beat this adversary within inches of his life, my attempt at murder is undermined by some mysterious third party. And it dawns on me, as though the magician just revealed his most notorious trick. I can’t see. I can’t see how many people I am fighting. It takes eternities for my body to finally reach the ground again. This time my muscles and tendons sneer at me when I urge them to continue. I can’t get up.

Betrayal. My entire body works against me. The parts of me that I could still feel disobey my commands and I am to lay face down on this horrid street, helpless. I hear thuds and my body quivers. Strangely enough, I don’t feel myself being hit. I just draw conclusions.

Cold. The cold air is even colder when you’re wet. And I was soaked with words of gratitude towards my blood and my initial opponent’s blood.

Inhale. And I gargle. My face is in a pool, a lake of my life as a thick fluid spreads out from what feels to be a crater in my skull. I taste the iron and I know I am drinking my own blood. I can feel the end coming soon.

Defeat. I close my eyes and accept the kicks and screams. I can’t hear anything, nor can I feel anything so I lose any interest in responding. If there was an interest in responding, anyway, I am physically unable to pursue it. My innermost being feels as though it is shrinking – or maybe not so much shrinking as much as it is cowering away from life in it’s entirety.

End.