“Cut Me, Mick, Cut Me!” The One Where I Take the Writing Workshop Challenge and Conjure Up a Measure Twice, Cut Once Scene from Rocky, not-poetry, fan-fiction by Stephen

Good evening Baristas, friends, and guests of the Go Dog Go Cafe! Have you heard? There is a Writing Workshop going on every Saturday this month and we would LOVE to have you participate. Throwing my support in the ring, so to speak, or should I say on the diamond… encrusted heavyweight champ’s belt I offer the following little-bit-more-than 300 word response to the prompt. Are YOU up for the challenge? Give it a shot, the Cafe is open world-wide, 24-7 but Tanya will be taking up posts and shares on Friday!

The eyeball was damaged. The eyeball was not supposed to be damaged, but it was damaged, nonetheless. How can a fighter win while punching blind? Seems like a question with a self-evident answer, but then we expose the fact that the fight was lost. Still, he put up a good one, and one that the crowd will remember for a long time. What else could a fighter do but have his trainer cut him? Is the trainer supposed to measure something in the minute between rounds, let alone twice… and with the stench of sweat and blood oozing off the screaming man?

Back to the fact exposed above, if a fighter had his eye cut and lost the fight, should the eye have been cut? Who casts that verdict? Not the thousands who will remember the valiant effort to go the distance, not the victor who shrugged in exhaustion when the loser came out of his corner for that last round with the pungent smells of ammonia and petroleum jelly added to the overall stench of the evening.

When she jumped in his arms at the end, having made her way out of hiding through the mobs of suddenly wealthy spectators, the eye didn’t matter, the cut didn’t matter, the color of the shorts on the poster didn’t matter; hell, the trainer could have had a heart attack and been forgotten in the blindness of the ecstasy of that moment. He fought and fought and then kept fighting and when the fighting ended, she held him tight in spite of the cocktail of odors that would make the most seasoned stomach wretch.

He had done it, she loved him no matter what the result of the fight. He finally knew the meaning of all the meat he punched, all the side stitches running, all the dozens of eggs swallowed whole, all the berations from that temporarily forgotten trainer.

(C) 2020 Stephen Fuller