His severe bruising was mostly to the body, concealed by the black sleeveless shirt. The legs looked improbably strong in the snug sweat pants of red, blessed with white man calves from some rapist devil ancestor, no doubt. The wrenched and stomped ankles were banded in red braces of the kind worn by the roosters of men, who kick with their feet. He would move flat of foot for some time. His face, clean now, had largely been begrimed, although there was nothing he could do about the goose egg over his left eye, laid by the very bird of misfortune herself.

“Eating right hands, Akbar?”

“A shoed foot more like.”

“Mister Noble shall be credited with the damage.”

All of a sudden haunted by the sound of his baritone voice rumbling lonely before his reflection, he repaired within, into his “fortress of blackitude,” as he had once seriously thought of his discipline, way back in the hate-darkened day before he grew into a full man. He stood regarding himself, seeing someone who appeared now to be so much more than he was. A fit cruiser-weight he appeared, his body twenty years the junior of his face, which now carried his age truly, the weariness of years etched in a single ducking in the dust of that forsaken place—an alley they called it, a type of place he had once been king of, now, like a toothless lion, relegated to one of its victims, rescued for the living through the agency of a poor, orphaned, Dyke girl and her unseemly, ironically-named, testicle-removing monkey wrench.

He could still look iron daggers in the mirror, and no doubt into men who yet believed in his myth. Noble, obviously the athletic cream of the white devil milk pot that had so recently been assigned to his ailing home city like the secret police of a looming army of occupation, had certainly told the men of his unit about their brutal rounds-long tussle in the ring, not four nights gone.

Even the need to ask was proof he was nearing the end and there was no need to compound the matter by answering.

He turned and looked at his right side, which gave no sign that the two ribs above the kidney were busted clean to pieces, hopefully too low to drive up into his lung.

He stood square and held out his big man-beating hands, and saw them even bigger in the sanctuary light, swollen so badly that he could barely close them, from those reprobates jumping up and down on his famous “chump hammers.” He could still make a fist though, and when he hit the bag those hands would not hurt nearly as bad as the shock wave ripping through his rib cage.

He turned to the left and saw there the horn-like lump upon his brow and the dark blood filling the white of his devil-seeing eye, and knew that old Eddie was rolling over in his ill-attended Christian grave over his prize boxer suffering the lump-scar of an idiot white fighter of the Italian kind. There was no outward sign of the damage to his kidney. It had not swelled overmuch, barely really, though it turned the toilet water a torturous red wine of misery, flecked with bits that were assuredly not grape skins, though they had been pressed out with all too willing feet.

He tasted the blood behind his broken nose, shattered up in its place. For once he was truly glad not to be a white man and be cursed with that high-boned nose. No one had to know it was done, that he’d snore for the rest of his numbered days and choke in his own blood in a fight against any real boxer.

But those days were behind him. Akbar Qama, the man the whites called Poet, knew the ring was behind him forever, no longer his sacred space, but his beckoning Pit, which only a fool would dive into for his final extinguishment.

There was thankfully nothing left in his stomach to vomit up, so he relaxed his breathing, exhaled, and extended his right hand as he slammed his left fist into the pit of his stomach, a trick that had always impressed sissies, when he let them practice their body punches on him. The shockwave hit him like a sheet of pain, singing “Akbar no more” into his soul as he went to his left knee and heard the ankle pop, as if a toaster had been given a truck spring and had tauntingly flung it’s burden across the kitchen.

A tear wet his left eye, just the corner, but wet it all the same—his “fortress of blackitude” crumbled like a castle of suddenly dry sand and he wept like a sissy, one girly whimper-step down Kismet’s traitorous ever-waiting maw—drowned out by the rumble of an enraged panther, as his open hand crashed into the mirror, shattering it and cracking the stud in the wall behind it, the innocent board he had put there, broken, just as God had once set an innocent boy down in these ill-fated shoes, a thing now broken.

The pain of the shockwave went beyond to another distant world, the agony of his ribs nothing to the ache in his soul. Then, as he removed his hand from the ruin of a once perfectly serviceable interior wall, he heard the needling simper of Brother Usef, the patriarch of this house, like everything in this wicked world built on the Devil’s Dollar, a wavering frame of corruption. Infused with something, something akin to strength, he turned.

Usef stood, small, soft and white-like before him, biting the back of his hand, and calculating with his eyes the damage just inflicted upon their personal dressing chamber by his now unpredictable right hand, deciding better than to voice the complaint as to how many of the White Devil’s Dollars this was going to cost him.

“What, Usef?” he barked like the snap of an impatient beast's jaws.

“Ah, ah, aaaaas, you said, the whites have returned, some even our color, a full gym, the entire special police unit it appears. Arrrr, ah, you well enough…to—Akbar?”

He stepped to the cringing man and loomed over him menacingly, broken nose to sissy guide for the green-eyed eye and snarled, “Akbar Qama was killed in an alley—three days dead. I’m now a ghost like you, nothing but what the Devil thinks I am, and his wicked dragon-bitch can drag me to hell as soon as I’ve fulfilled my purpose. The dyke girl remains after I’ve gone or I dine on your everlasting guts in The Pit, where we surely share a well-earned berth.”

The trickle of urine dripping from Usef’s snake-skin shoes to the polished floor, even as the delicious scent of fear wafted palpably wet up into the ruin of his nose, announced the termination of their conclave. He stepped off and rumbled, “I shall busy our pallid guests as you decorate yourself afresh, Brother.”

He felt all wrong as he walked outward, downward, toward the rotten world, and felt the righter for it.