He was never any match for me and my words. I could spit them out like machine gun fire, articulating my thoughts with such precision that he too sharpened up his language, but sometimes he failed and was reduced to repeating my words back at me as if they were his. I would laugh. He was never any match for me.
Until he threw me across the room ‘You fell’ he said ‘I hardly touched you’, but my arm was black from the elbow to the wrist and all the next day he averted his eyes while I wore a short sleeve top and held my forehead in my hand. I had been drunk, like he said, yet cutting through the fog of memory was the white-cold sensation of flying through the air, landing against the wall (‘how?’), arm flung out in surprise, to protect my clever head as it smashed against the wall.
Words or blows, which hurt more? He would say the former, I would say the latter. We would fight to the death (mine)…
Thought Bubbles 