The Fighter Read Online Free

shoved Paul into a corner and told him to
face it. That's when Paul saw dozens of corpses stacked atop one another by the
other wall; they all wore suits and their hands were clean and soft and they
had very nice hair. Each had a frosted hole in the perfect center of his
forehead. "Can't trust a man who won't fight," the Duke said without
much emotion. "This is a mercy."
    When
the gun barrel pressed to the back of his skull, Paul woke up with a jerk.
    Frail
angles of rust-colored light fell through the Venetian blinds to touch Paul's
face. His head felt broken and weak, like it'd been smashed open in the night
and its contents spilled over the pillow. His mouth felt blowtorched and the
tendons of his neck stretched to their tensile limit, seemingly unable to
support the raw ball of his skull. He lay in his childhood room in his parents'
house. Surfing posters were tacked to the walls. A glow-in-the-dark
constellation decorated the ceiling.
    In
the bathroom, he consulted his reflection in the mirror: skin dull and
blotched, right eye a deep purple, swollen closed like a dark blind drawn
against the light. Elsewhere his skin was sickly pale, as though marauding bats
had drained the blood from it while he slept. He spread his split lips. Two
teeth gone: top left incisor, bottom left cuspid. He poked his gums with his
pinkie until blood came.
    He
stood under the showerhead. The knobs of his spine were raw where he'd slid
down the shopfront. He tried jerking off in hopes it might unknit the tension
knotting his gut, but it was like trying to coax life out of a rope. In the
blood-colored darkness behind his eyelids all he could see was this huge fist,
this scarred ridge of knuckles exploding like a neutron bomb.
    He
carefully patted dry his various lumps and abrasions. He found an old pair of
Ray Bans and adjusted them to cover his puffed eye.
     

     
    The
kitchen was a monotone oasis: white fridge and stove, alabaster tile floor,
marble countertops. A bay window offered a view of Lake Ontario lying silver
beneath a chalky mid-morning sky. The backyard grass was petaled with the
season's first frost.
    He
cracked the freezer door, relishing the blast of icy air that hit his face. In
fact, he liked it so much he stuck his entire head in. Frozen air flowed over
the dome of his skull.
    He
rummaged through the fridge. His mother was on the Caspian Sea Diet. Dieters
must subsist upon edibles found in and around the Caspian basin: triggerfish,
sea cucumbers, drab kelps, crustaceans. The diet's creator—a swarthy MD with a
face like a dried testicle—cited the uncanny virility of Mediterraneans,
evidenced by the fact that many continued to labor as goatherds and pearl
divers late into their seventies.
    Paul's
search yielded nothing one might squarely define as edible: a quivering block of
tofu, a glazy-eyed fish laid out across a chafing dish, what looked to be bean
sprouts floating in a bowl of turd-colored water.
    He
shoved aside jars of Cape Cod capers and tubs of Seaweed Health Jelly.
"What the .. .fuck" He slammed the fridge door. On the
kitchen island: Christmas cards.
    His
mother got cracking on them earlier each year. She sent off hundreds, licking
envelopes until her mouth was syrupy with mucilage. The cards were pure white
with gold filigree and the raised outline of a bell. A stack of pine-scented
annual summations sat beside them: season's greetings from Harris county!
    His
own summation read:
    Paul
is still living at home and we're so happy to have him, but lately he's been
talking about finding his own place, leaving Jack and I empty nesters.
    That
was it? A year gone by and all his mother could say was that he was looking for
his own place? A cowl of paranoia descended upon him; he considered scribbling
something else, a flagrant lie if need be— Paul was voted
one of Young Economist's "Up and Comers Under 30" or Paul recently returned from a whirlwind seven-city business
junket or Paul is in talks with Singapore Zoo