The Light That Failed. (1,994 words)

My memory of her always starts when I was eight.

Little boy, sitting on a front porch stoop of a dilapidated apartment building.

"He called me weak," I'd complained to her.

Karen smiled, not unkindly, with a soft, sympathetic, long-suffering strength. "That bothers you,"

"Buh-because! I don't ever wanna be seen as weak, that isn't like him... he's never weak in the ring... he never loses... on the matches I taped..." I finished, half to myself.

Karen sat on the step, elbows resting on her thighs.

"Hold your hand out, palm flat, in the air."

"...?"

"Humor me."

Not following, I'd did as I was bid, feeling the humid warmth of that summer air beating on my freckled skin.

"You know what the most powerful force in the universe is?"

"...Tell me."

"Our sun. The sun's light gives us all of the plants, and trees, and gives us warmth, so we can grow. It travels millions of miles through space."

"Ninety-three million," says a little boy, solemnly, dutifully reciting a useless fact I'd been taught by some second-grade teacher.

"See, that's so strong! Look down..."

"That's your shadow... you made that. D'you know what that means?"

"That means that light, the most powerful light in the universe traveled 93 million miles to get to this sidewalk. Only to be stopped by you."

I smiled, warmly.

Whenever after, I was afraid, when kids on the block were cruel, or my father was.... unforgiving.

I knew that I'd be okay.

That I was strong.

Because I'd always have my shadow.

My memories of her always jump then; scattershot, to the night that dad and I sat, side-by-side, in the waiting room of a hospice.

I'd sat bolt-upright in my hard, plastic seat, and Donald had looked at me askance. His worry mirrored how I felt.

I'd held my hand out, palm flat as I stared at it, pale blue under the fluorescent light. "No... no, no no..."

"What the hell's matter with you, boy..." Donald squinted, "What's -"

I couldn't blurt out the complexity, the pain that mom laying in the hospital bed was bringing my insides, tearing me up.

More immediate was the concern as I stared at my hand. In the harsh, bright light, I couldn't find my shadow.

---

Week-in-week-out, everyone from Black to Bacchus believes the ticket to getting inside my head is to call me by my fucking government name Daniel, spout the same BS about me palling around in the Vanguard..... how tag-teaming made me soft.

So I welcome the attacks from every one of the idiots on my side of the bracket, because they're distinctly unaware they're hurling stones into the sights of a machine gun.

None of them are safe. Not Gerard. Not Addy. Not Alice.

It's only when we free ourselves from the illusions of what we think we have in hand, can we focus on what we really want.

---

Rumiko looked, non-plussed, as one of my new students picked up his fallen brethren. I stood, stripped to a gi, a monolith of unforgiving stone.

Rumiko turned to the small gathering of Pine Street kids who had signed up, picking up the fliers that had littered the street;

Who came, interested in learning combat skills, and who threw their bodies against me and were helped off the mat one-by-one.

"Terrible," I snapped, "Next."

Rumiko stepped in front of me, "You're going too far."

"The kids in the neighborhood want to come train with me, and I'm indulging them," I reasoned, trying to push past her. "It'll help... this neighborhood needs fighters, that can push back when Death Riders come around... when..." I didn't say Hinata's name.

"So you'd train a street gang to fight against Yakuza?" She was incredulous. "Sounds so simple."

"I'd give them tools... to protect themselves," I said, frostily, looking in her eye. "Nobody wants to be weak."

"I think it's just you that doesn't want to be weak, Daniel," Rumiko said, shaking her head. "I think everything you've gone through this year has eaten at you."

"You're ridiculous, I'm just trying to teach these kids - "

"Then tell yourself, after Corey Black stole a win from you in your mind, that you aren't pushing yourself, and these kids around you, harder because you don't want to be seen as weak, failing."

Silence.

"Tell yourself that you aren't questioning what Bacchus said about you, that when he's gone, you'll only have yourself to blame for not succeeding. You can't, can you?"

Now I turn to her. "Get out, Rumiko."

She huffs, with her patented, narrowed-eye look of you-must-be-stupid. She turns to one of my students, giving him a quick word in Japanese, and they move off together.

Sometime later, I'm alone, shutting off the overhead light with a bang.

Backlit and awash in the red neons of Japantown outside, my lair is covered in shadow.

I look down, and, as if caught in the throes of some memory, I stare at the stretched, black shadows on the mat, the inky-black cutout of night set against the glare of the reds.

My shadow is still with me, despite it all.

The light travels, but it's stopped by me.

I'm not surprised when that shadow grows teeth, white, growing against the dark, turning into a madcap grin.

"She's wrong about you," the shadow says.

I know.

"Even if she wasn't," the distorted, elongated shadow on the floor reasons, "You think that you're weak because you haven't done what you set out to do. I'm here to tell you, you will."

I'm listening.

"You vowed never to be weak and powerless again, a long time ago. Even when you feel most alone."

"Even on the worst nights of your life, I'll always be with you."

"Always."

---

So what do you want in this, Alice?

I'm going to be honest, not bullshit or dismiss you completely out of hand as "The Human Horror Show" (fucking gag me) did.

You're the type of girl that counts who she's knocked off. Who touts on her bio the scalps she's claimed?

Who brags that she beat Ash Blake to get here... and in every single big shot she's taken, always makes damn sure that they walk away remembering her name.

I see you, Alice.

The hustle you've put in in your sunrise years in this business, the hard work you've put in growing from an ass-kicking, loud-mouthed punk grrl to a Queen. Respect all the work you've put in.

That's... about as much credit as I'm willing to give you.

I was absolutely struck by the fiery passion, calling for an uprising, showing the world who you were at All-In... only for that to sink down into leaden, bitter disappointment as you settled into the same exact spiel as I've always heard about me.

Same bland, tuneless interpretation.

Jesus fucking christ, Alice, you want me to hand a flashcard to you line-by-line so I can feed you the next unoriginal thing to say?

That isn't even getting into your painfully insipid "origin story".

I should find you inspiring, cut from the same cloth.

Growing up a gawky punk kid in the southside of Chitown, running away and making shitty garage band music with your girl Cherry, living fast-n'-hard on the underbelly of sex, drugs, and rock?

You should be, to me, a heartwarming tale of someone from the old barrio that made it.

Instead, your reductive and empty paean to my career's effect on you at Uprising has me thinking we're going to get a more in-depth look at your "origins" now that you're face-to-face with me.

How you watched the first House of Pain between myself and Boca on pre-Youtube video clips from 2004 while you were in middle school, kindling a hunger in you to do what we were doing.

How you've taken those lessons through adolescence, wore them as armor.

How it titillated you to find yourself in the same fed as me so that you might test yourself.

What do you believe this is, Alice? Old school versus your school, washed-up-vet versus young-and-hungry?

Do you believe, as you said, "my time has gone", that you alone can dispose of my... aging and rotting body?

'Cause I'll tell ya kid... the only response to that is a Bacchus tweet of "lol. Lmao." and a hand-jerking-off gesture.

That shows not only did ya barely even absorb the underpinning psychological layers of those hardcore moments you claim to have grown up idolizing, it means you know fuck-all about the will it took me to make it through those grueling battles still standing.

If I really believed I've inspired a generation of wrestlers as devoid of critical thinking as you, I'd go Cobain and pull a trigger with my toe.

I think you have a familiarity with names like Downfall, Warpath...

Believe my nihilistic, uncaring attitude of whether an opponent walks out under his own power spoke to you...

I don't actually think you are going to know what to do when that's trained on you.

You won't panic, you won't wilt. I believe you when you claim, as you did against Regan, that you've weathered the roughest city streets, had to fight for your life.

Despite the ten miles of bad road that brought you here, the bar fights and broken glass, the hard knocks, I know for damnsure you've never looked me in the eye.

(And you believed that I'd "turned good"..... which shows you haven't actually paid attention to anything I've done this year, either.)

Here's a gimme that a supposed IEW fangrrrl like you should know: I used to have an honest-to-god catchphrase.

I used to say: "Win, lose, or draw, you are NEVER... going to forget the night, you went one-on-one... with the BEAST UNLEASHED."

That's held true, even throughout this year, Alice.

Win, lose, or draw... you won't forget the night.

...I won't accept a draw.

...I don't think you fit into the small percentage of competition to survive against me long enough to pull one out.

I've seen you just fail when confronted with the problem of how to solve Jill and Regan, and in defeat, you could only gush about how many millions tuned in to watch you fail.

Now that you're up against me... what?

Are you here to turn heads, raise viewership?

Gain a following as you puff your A-cup tiddies out at me, put some bass in your metal growl, try to present yourself as Queen Regent of Hardcore?

Alice... you ain't doing anything under the sun Jessie Lee wasn't already doing.

Until the Pure Cup, I was half convinced you two were pulling the exact same gimmick, since you have your catchphrase about being a "Brutal Bitch" in the same busted cadence as her touting "Leethality".

You come at me, who innovated this fucking game of barbed wire and broken glass when you were still a child.

You'll see a "man at the end of his rope" and I'll see the noose I'm tightening around your throat.

I'll tell you what I want.

This goes beyond me wanting to get to the finals the second year in a row because I want it.

I'm going to break through every barrier put in my way on this side of the bracket until I'm through to the other side.

If "Deathproof" is the man he boasts himself to be, I'm getting my match against him in the finals; That's a single-minded goal.

If he can't, and I outlast him, I'll see that he was never the man he promoted himself as to start with.

Week after week, I'll stand there under the lights, and let the people who think they're the strongest will hurl themselves at me, to hit me and shatter, diffuse against me.

To one, I'm going to leave nothing but a remnant, an afterimage, a wasted shadow staring back up at me.

A light that failed.