by Danielle Mantia, SUNY Cortland
Posted in on Thursday, Dec 22
My fingers are tearing apart the skin around my nails, making great red lines smear downwards towards my knuckles. It is endless until I can get up and go and somehow this habit amuses me and passes the minutes. I am thinking about beating up Jeremy Winter.
Some people enjoy thinking about why they are angry and resolving issues buried deep in their brains. I prefer to simply punch someone in the nose. It is the easiest way to make them shut up. To make them stop with their ramblings or angry diatribes. It is my favorite way to pass my time, this imagining of bloody noses and black eyes. Jeremy has been my bane for nearly three days now and I am in a perpetual state of envisioning his face as a pulpy version of what it is now: pudgy, pale, and wrinkled with pseudo deep thoughts. I don't want to discuss with him why he is making no sense or how he is regurgitating a line from a news article as his own thoughts. I would rather simply reach across the room and crack a good one against his jaw, maybe causing the bone to jut out in a nasty direction.
I like the lines bones make; I like the hard lines. They make terrific smashing, crunching sounds when they come across pressure, the same way my own brain makes when it comes against it's own troubles. Skin and muscle and fat surround and protect valuable bone, which is sharper and gleams white once you get all the blood off. Bone is not eternal, but you can find it for millions of years if you leave it the right way. Skin withers off and pretty soon, we all look the same. Like punching. Doesn't matter who you punch, the right angle, the right amount of force, and you are cracking that bone. You are breaking something inside of them that words can never quite get through. A red neck or a wall street asshole: you can break them both if you know how to do it. 
Sometimes, although I like the way words feel in my mouth or in my head, they don't feel as good as a fist in your fingers. The roll up of lanky fingers into a tight fist, held together by knuckle is beautiful. It is harsh and tough and yet fluid. My body, any body, can be graceful in the way it tightens and readies for the fight. I can feel my body twitch as my muscles tense up and my bones become guarded against attack themselves. That adrenaline you feel is tough and you build it up, dancing back and forth and rolling hips and bucking shoulders. You get ready to move. To box is to be a well constructed dancer and to be ready to shimmy from one move to the next, pouncing on whatever you can pounce on; hungry for the win and for the way it all feels when you can hold something fragile in your grip.
When I get ready to go, my back feels like it has wings the way my shoulder blades flex and move, warming up to make sure my arms can move fast enough to get the first good jab in, or to block a good swing. But they are never very good, those swings coming at me. They are pathetic and weak. The other side never knows how to hit; they know the moves or the angles, but they never know what it is like to love the fight. To love the feel of soft, hard, crack. It is mere sounds assaulting ears and skin. And that is the amazing part. The sounds you can feel. The way it can shoot through your entire body and warp you into believing you are god.
When you hit, suddenly your opinion matters and I like that. I get the need to win wars, because sometimes, sometimes it is just so frustrating when they won't listen. When they cannot hear the reason you are directing towards them. When all they can hear is you smashing your bones into their bones.
So I am now imagining this boy's face at the mercy of what my hands can do. And I am studying the way my thin finger bones move across the arm of the chair and how they meld into round knuckles and how my skin is soft but you can see the calluses where I have hit things before, namely walls and doors but also noses, cheekbones, shoulders, backs, and chests. I once learned that to hit people in the kidney was to win a fight because no one could recover from that very quickly. And so I hit people there too, although that tends not to hurt my hand or leave a mark. I study and remember and I feel like Jeremy doesn't stand a chance. I feel like his voice is only getting higher and more obnoxious and filled less with thoughts and more with a ransom note of ct and paste words. He is meaningless and so really, I reason, hitting him would be like hitting a snooze button. And who would blame me? We all roll our eyes and say nasty words later, but on he here and now, no one is even talking. I want my fist to talk for me. For my body to move in the way words can never move. Because they say the pen is mightier than the sword, but it can never feel this way.
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