style="font-size:15px;"> She hiccupped again and pounded her chest with a fist. “You’re drunk.”
“Nope. I’m high on Jesus. Been saved and everything.” He stared at her like she was a twenty-dollar bill he found in the street. “You what? You wanna?”
Nina smelled him, his metallic beer breath, sweat, and the chemical smell of air-conditioned flesh. At some point that night, he had eaten celery. He breathed high in his chest. The canvas of his skin was uneven, with pale jade patches near the veins in his temples. His shoulders strained his jean jacket.
He reached for her. She stepped out of the path of his hand.
“Hey.” A sharpness rose in his voice. The alcohol cleared from his eyes, and the capillaries around his nostrils reddened as he sobered up. An updraft brushed their hair off their foreheads. High in the atmosphere, Nina smelled rain.
He said, “C’mere, you little bitch,” and grabbed her wrist.
Nina’s other arm whipped around and bit into the side of his neck, edging downward into his carotid artery. His knees buckled and his fingers loosened. Before he could recover, she kicked out his standing leg and slammed her palm into his chest, clotheslining him. His surprised face glided through the air, a freckled moon.
He landed on his back with a soft, patting sound. Almost without realizing it, Nina had caught his head on her instep a few inches above the concrete. She cradled it on her foot for a second, just to let him know he had been saved yet again, before sliding it off her shoe to the ground.
It was over. She stood above him, panting. Adrenaline zinged across her chest. The man’s neck muscles strained under his skin as his lungs pulled hard for oxygen. Nina flipped him onto his belly, bent his arms into chicken wings, and pinned them high behind his back with her knee.
Her knuckles were turning pink, his imprint still on her skin. She hiccupped again and played back everything that had happened since her last hiccup. How had she hit him? What came first? Could she have done it better?
On his stomach, the man was still sucking air, his face torqued to the side against the pavement. Nina thumped between his shoulder blades a few times to help him get his wind back. His breath rasped against her shoe, and a dab of spittle landed on the toe. “This. Ain’t. Right,” he gasped between breaths.
Nina shoved his fists higher up his back, and he grunted. The bar door stayed shut. Her vision was beginning to clear, but the graffiti on the door made even less sense than before. The man’s pupils jittered back and forth.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Nobody’s watching.”
“Let me go.” She could tell that he was trying to sound reasonable, but the knee in his back cropped his words. “Cut me a break. I'm only human.”
“But I'm not,” she said.
He twisted, trying to see her face. His birthmark was a sapphire shadow. He asked, “Then what are you?”
She reached for his wallet.
Chapter Two: The Fox and the Rabbit
On a walk with his student, a Zen master watched a fox chase a gray rabbit across their path. The rabbit hopped in frantic zigzags, and the fox streaked closely behind. The animals disappeared into the underbrush.
The Zen master said, “That rabbit will escape the fox.”
The student said, “But the fox is bigger. It’s stronger.”
“The fox is running for his dinner,” his teacher said. “The rabbit is running for his life.”
~
Nina was a thief, technically, although she never defined herself that way. Apart from being negative-sounding, it was relative. The way Nina saw it, if you stole a wallet, people called you a thief. If you stole an election, they called you President.
Nina instead thought of herself as a kind of pool shark, except she didn’t play pool. It wasn’t her fault that they underestimated her. Men shouldn’t be hitting women anyway, I mean, really, what kind of world was this? She was an enforcement officer, collecting small fines from men who violated the social contract. Every animal steals to live. Nina liked to pay her rent on time. She liked to be fiscally responsible.
Nina shoplifted, too, but only stuff on sale. Meat, bound in butcher paper, sunk into a handbag. Filet mignon, fresh tuna, an artichoke. Socks, stockings, underwear, olive oil. If she thought she was being watched, she stood in line to pay for a single box of spaghetti, and walked out cradling a full purse of supermarket makeup and shellfish. She wondered which other shoppers among her were also harboring hidden Oil of Olay and vials of saffron. She suspected a higher incidence of shoplifting for embarrassing things like athlete’s foot powder, vaginal itch cream, Beano, or extra-small condoms, so she made sure to purchase those kinds of things outright if needed, in case security cameras were trained in those directions.
No, stealing was sponsorship. Fighting was the passion. She never stopped, never tried. During dry spells, she missed it like it was lost legs or a drifting lover. She knew what she loved.
Of course, like most careers, it’s harder for a woman, and easily complicated by standards. Nina had a code: she never hit first. Her teacher Jackson often used to quote an Okinawan proverb, Karate ni sente nashi—there is no first attack in karate—and Nina took it seriously. Anything after the first strike, she figured, was fair game.
Besides the first strike rule, she didn’t fight kids, women, the homeless or elderly, gangbangers, and crazy people. For practical reasons, she also avoided drug addicts and her neighbors. Basically, she tried not to fight anyone she wouldn’t have sex with.
It took work. Nina exercised every day to exhaustion. She dressed trampy, hung out in questionable areas of town. Certain streets, all she needed to do was stand with her back pressed to the wall, knee up, and someone came along demanding a date or worse. On the same streets the next night, nada. The odds sucked. Because she couldn’t get around it, no matter how hard she tried: people were essentially good. And she wasn’t as good as she used to be.
It was probably temporary, just a series of dumb mistakes resulting in minor injuries—a dislocated jaw, bruised ribs, shiners. They added up. Last month outside a 7-Eleven in the rain, a biker grabbed her and she punched him in the mouth. His front teeth broke and embedded themselves in her hand. He smiled, and blood streamed from his mouth in a silky rope. He hit her, and hit her again, and didn’t stop until she ducked and he broke his fist on the wet wall behind her. She heard the bones crack like small thunder, and still he cocked his fist again, a blinking robot. She ran straight home and lay damp and sweating under the covers until the sun came back up.
Men on meth were the worst because they felt no pain, had no morals. She tried to avoid them, but you couldn’t always identify them if they bathed. She wore precautionary leather, but she still bore scars on her ribs and arms. She had been cut five times. Her nose was crooked and blunt from breaking. She had fractured four ribs and a pinky. Her jaw was permanently askew and clicked when she chewed. When she groped her skull, her fingers found dents and scars she didn’t remember getting.
Sometimes she wondered if she had ever seriously hurt any of them.
Perhaps she should go on medication, and take one of those drugs that sound like superheroes (Effexor!
