“On their necks have We placed chains which reach the chin,

“And forced up are their heads…”

“…Grandmamma? Grandmamma, the crickets out here in the country sound so grand."

“Go back to sleep, Baby, it’s dark yet…”

“When the collars shall be on their necks and the chains to drag

Them into Hell: then in the fire shall they be burned.”

The crickets woke him, though the light of day poured through his Mecca-facing portal on the world.

“No, fool, you are concussed.”

He lay stiff, drenched in sweat, dry, head a ringing, on his Judo mat bed.

He sat up and heard the popping of his rib where it had been torn from the cage. The insane devil had done for him; had beaten his brain until it rang and had knocked in a rib as well.

It was late, mid morning, he had overslept.

He was dry as a clay pipe in the desert, and pushed up out of bed to drink his fill, his knees, ankle, wrist and rib all popping to beat the band, as Grandmamma would have said. His head pounded like a base drum and his mouth was parched. The ache in his ribcage was much more than the single busted rib, but the pain of a good working over, and told of an old man’s handling under the gloves of a younger man.

“Water,” he croaked, sounding like the dead, and reached out for the row of gallon jugs at the base of his electrical spool table. As he reached and stooped—crawled, even, desperate in his ragged thirst—and his shoulder popped even as his ribs sang of the torments of Hell, he encountered an empty jug, then another, then another…and six devil-cursed more!

“I have woked—awaken—dry, with six gallons somehow gone?”

A sour smell assaulted his senses as the scurrying of rats in the half-dark beneath the Night Lamp window drew his attention. He staggered toward their feast as they scurried into the floorboards that took them below to the ruin proper—to their domain. He reached the spot where he had shamefully thrown up like a boy his first day in a July gym, and the rats had made a feast of it.

He stood weaving, reaching out to touch the wall, and concluded that he must have slept two nights and a day away, based on the water consumption alone. His jogging sweats hung from pegs neatly enough—dry, when they should still be soaked. He must have water, must have the breath of day in his lungs! Having given himself over to Kismet, and before that, having dallied with the echoed spirits of Grandmamma’s departed woodland gods, the observance of prayers missed did not weigh upon his mind. He simply yearned, like a wild thing, to feel the warmth of the sun on his face and the caress of the breeze against his cheek.

Many long moments later, Akbar Qama—or a shadow thereof—emerged from his Day Break window, scrambling down the deteriorating brick face of the house back into the rubble pile that covered the concrete yard. He limped with shaking knees across the loose brick and crumbled block until he stood in the alley, attempting to straighten his back entirely, which was not happening. The white devil cat was there to warn him with its soulless eyes.

Embarrassed at the prospect of taking to the street before regaining his strength, he limped deeper into the alley, shuffling along like a wino of seven decades, not a boxer of 5.9 decades who just went 15 rounds with a prime young fighter…

Step, after shaky step, confident that he would straighten to his full height by the time he reached Howard Street, he staggered on, thankfully hidden from the world. His hands—ashen, cramped and sorely bruised upon that square rock of a Caucasian head—hid in the pockets of his hoody, which he wore on this blistering August morning without shedding a drop of sweat, for there was none to shed. He was bone dry and listless, pitifully cold like the elderly in their hunched way, cowering against the cold wind of old age. Perhaps a half hour went by as he made his way down the trash strewn alley, so pitiful a figure that not even a dog bothered to snarl a threat or bark a warning, but simply lazed and sniffed of his decay.

He limped on, recalling dimly dreaming of listening to the crickets sing into the night as he lay awake on the couch at Grandmamma’s house in Turner Station in the distant 1960s.

"Supa Nigga? Yo sure, Yo?"

“Nah, Puffy, dat ain’ Supa Nigga, dat jus’ an old broke-down broke-ass man!”

“Daz funny, Yo, I tought dis was da nigga dat poued ma Steel Reserve in da gutta fo givin’ some to one a ‘is lille towel ‘ead gym niggas.”

The two reprobates, normally of no account, currently towered over him in his hunched state, one barring his way onward, the other barring his way back, both utterly devoid of their normal emotion in his presence—fear.

What was Akbar Qama without his fear, his menace, asked Kismet from her shadowed place?

“Nothing,” he wheezed in response to the demon that haunted him.

“Nothin’? What, you da nothin’ nigga now—boy?”

Akbar Qama gathered his strength, straightened up to face the larger of his two antagonists, and felt the rib click in his cage. As he pulled the ashen hands from his hoody to deal with this one, there was a chill along his shoulders that merged with the ringing in his head behind his ears—a premonition of failure, like that feeling in the dressing room before the Tillman fight when Usef was nowhere to be found. There was a nerve pinched in his neck that was making it difficult for him to raise his hands.

A sneer came from the big blubbery face of the fool before him as the puffy pork-eating cheeks crinkled with their vile smile—and the world exploded as a brick shattered across the side of his head behind and above his right ear, sending him staggering into the fence and scrapping his face down across the rusty links as he pitched forward.

A big sneakered foot was burying itself in his ribs, the good ribs on his right side, and a smaller, lighter, foot was stomping into his kidney, each body-wracking stomp accompanied by gleeful and clownish exclamations.

He gritted his teeth and bore the punishment as his thoughts spun inward and images of Kismet, a black hood draping her scaly neck, swam before his wearied and pained mind’s eye.