Round 1.

The crowd’s silence slithers into my ear the way that maggot writhes through the side of a skull and out of a hollow eye-socket, trying to reach scraps of rotting sinew near the skeleton’s jaw. This one is missing a left leg, and I recognise the bones of my wheelchair- bound English teacher from second grade.

“I want a clean fight,” a bird with too many eyes and too little horns says. A few feathers spring loose from its wings. It steps backwards, leaving a trail of slick, black oil. “Touch gloves, and then back to your corners, alright? ” We nod. It’s rare we agree on something.

The cry of a newborn is our boxing bell. I bump my plastic glove against my opponent’s; theirs is made of leather so fresh it moos. It is the corpse of a cow I saw on a Japanese farm during my fifth Christmas. We part as soon as we make contact and begin to circle like the vultures flying above us.

In the face-off, I stood tall before flashing lights, pride coursing through my blood and smiling with the pointed teeth of a bear trap. They are not pointed now. The crowd does not gasp as I fail to dodge a left hook. A crimson shard of pain digs into my lip as I see my baby teeth scatter on the floor of the ring – they are as brown and round as popcorn kernels at the bottom of a cardboard box with red and white stripes. I think Finding Nemo is playing in the background. I should have brushed my teeth more and eaten sugar less and packed my mouth guard last night. ‘I told you so’ is the end of the world.

My opponent is trying to stick their finger in the wound they have found. Their gloves have grown to the size of a shadow’s hands, searching for the gap in my gums. I am tired after soccer practice but I lay awake, ribs pried apart and eyelids peeled back as I watch the shadow roil and shift across my walls. It gurgles and heaves, swallowing cracked paint a shade of green I was obsessed with at twelve years old. When I finally sleep, the shadow is warded off by my blanket. I wake the next morning feeling young and stupid.

I am backed into a corner. There, I find all the stuffed toys gifted to me on all my birthdays.

They are stacked upon adolescent bedsheets that smell like wilted lavender. I forgot to hide them before the sleepover; the ropes scraping against my back are the jeers of my friend Sam. I cannot let him tell our classmates.

My fanged fist strikes. He is on the floor. I am sorry that he is crying. I am not sorry that he does not say a word to anyone. The bell rings.

Round 2.

I get the jump on them this time.

My opponent stumbles, like a tree about to be uprooted by a typhoon. Whenever the lady in pink on the television reported these storms, I would grin at the rain hammer the pavement through my living room window. Now, I embody the elements, my punches like lashing winds.

A simmering, sticky wetness drips between my fingers but I pay my bleeding knuckles no mind. I have turned into a machine with only one looping algorithm: left, right, right, jab. Left, right, right, jab. I will be here until the skeletal crowd sees one of their own in the ring.

When I had braces, I used to think there was more after this. I would be a painter, a writer, a rockstar, an actor. But the gold bleeding from my opponent’s face reflects my own until all I can see are the victories I am yet to cinch, the praise I am yet to hear.

I am blinded by the ichor. My opponent socks the hollow cavern of my stomach. I stumble backwards into earth-shattering fury masquerading as love. The floor is a carpet the color of trust and hope and my opponent grabs the fraying corners, pulling in one practiced move like a malicious magician.

The crowd is on their feet, skeleton heels clicking together like Dorothy’s shoes. My opponent is on me before my back hits the ground. I recognise clinical white marble and grey scuff marks from the wheels of a hospital gurney. A punch to my jaw. Another to my temple.

The cold cradling the back of my head keeps the white-hot pain from scorching me, refusing to let me rest even as the imprint of my opponent’s rings are branded into my skin.

Behind my eyelids, I stare down into a frothing river beneath a bridge. I hear a dripping tap, its metal reflecting a blossoming crimson bath. I have not been through enough, but I think I will give up.

I do not know whether I am glad my anger refuses.

Red and blue surge through my feet and out my arm. It is the shame and spite that propelled my fists all those years ago, leaving diamond-shaped scars between my fingers. I strike my opponent in the face and I do what fury demands. I have always been very good at that. The roar I let loose is the drunken scream of a friend, fighting someone who called him something he has tried not to be his entire life.

“Haymaker!” My brother shouts from the stands. A skeleton’s jaw clicks. “Throw a haymaker!” Now they are on the floor, shrouded in my shadow. I grab them by their shoulders, rough sand of a beach beneath my fingers. It is the one I visited with my parents last summer. The sun shines brighter when you have tried to open death’s door, only to find it locked.

Wind, howling from the top of a mountain my mother always meant to climb, blows the sand away before I can speak.

There will be a rematch.

Mia Cheng (she/her) is a final-year university student at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Although she works and studies in London, UK, she is originally from Hong Kong. Her fiction has appeared in Witcraft.