The Wrestling (a fiction)

My father: stubs of hair sprouting from his chin, a permanently mischievous grin, and always fighting somewhere.

He told us once that he first laid eyes on our mother during a match.

If you asked him about it, he’d say, “She was wearing these ridiculous oversized sunglasses in the crowd. Looked like she had two televisions strapped to her face.”

Then he would pause and hoot with laughter.

And when he was feeling particularly boastful, he’d add that on that day he fought his opponent with only one eye, because he was afraid that if he looked away from my mother for too long, she would disappear like smoke.

Yesterday, I visited one of the schools where my father trained as a boy, and I saw legions of men just like him.

There was one wrestler in particular who bore a remarkable resemblance to him. Hair crawling down the length of his face, around my age now. He was yelling, jumping, and lunging all at once, as if movement itself was ejecting out of him too quickly.

I fixed my eyes on him.

I watched him watching his opponent. Watched him occasionally steal glances at the crowd between bursts of violence.

Soon enough, I found myself searching the crowd in the direction of his glances.

My eyes found: little children sat near the edge of the ring, Serif - the shopkeeper, standing nearby with his mistress, and beside them the motorcyclist whose bike I rode into town on.

Behind Serif stood a young woman in a thin blue wrapper and a white blouse. She was so engrossed in the fight that she failed to notice the scoop of ice cream slipping from its cone toward the concrete below.

Beside her stood a man more handsome than any of the wrestlers. More handsome even than my father. She was the anchor of the wrestler’s wandering gaze.

He wore a white T-shirt tucked neatly into his trousers and kept glancing at his watch. They had thier hands interlaced. This man, (like me, and the wrestler) too seemed incapable of fully looking away from this woman.

I watched all of this unravel before me.

Then I reached into my backpack and pulled out my notebook and camera.

In the notebook, I searched for an empty page and wrote the moment.

I tucked the notebook into my back pocket, lifted the camera to my face, and immortalized the fighter in a photograph.