Salt Forged Stories

Mid October, That Year

Jennifer McCowan wasn’t wearing anything that would be out of place at a gym, but the few times she went to the gym to run, everyone else wasn’t there to watch her have a fist fight with her roommate. She looked herself over in the dressing room mirror, turning to get a better look at her profile; tall and slim, she was wearing her favorite pair of soccer shorts, high cut and blue with aquamarine and yellow stripes. She’d never been so self-conscious how skinny they made her legs look, pale and freckled despite the best efforts of the Southern California sun. She barely tipped the scales at 112 lbs. and owed her flat stomach to that more than any actual attention paid to her diet or exercise. It certainly didn’t hurt though. Her eyes wandered north and she sighed; the same low body fat percentage that produced her slim physique also gave her little in the way of cleavage, a fact unfortunately emphasized by her bright turquoise sports bra. She pushed her breasts together, well, as best she could with these big bulky black boxing gloves on. The woman who’d helped tie them assured her that they were her size, but Jennifer couldn’t help but think they looked comically oversized on her. She was thankful that her pixie cut naturally stayed out of her eyes, faded streaks of green still evident in her auburn tresses. Standing in front of the mirror, wearing what felt like basically nothing, Jennifer suddenly felt very small, very frail, and very nervous about the next 10 minutes of her life. She hoped this wouldn’t end up on Youtube somehow. She-

“Hey, Jen, let’s go!” shouted Kelsey, the upperclassman who’d helped her with the preparations. She’d peeked inside the dressing room to find Jen staring off into space. “The first fight just finished; time to show them what you got!.” Jennifer turned around with a start, shaken from her introspection. When the older girl saw the apprehension in her eyes, she placed a warm hand of Julie’s slender shoulders. “You sure? Maybe we should have agreed to wear headgear after all. Maybe we-,” “Listen,” Kelsey said warmly, “You’ll be fine. You look great; she’s probably more nervous than you are. Just take a deep breath, remember why you wanted to fight her in the first place, and try to remember some of what we taught you. Think about why you got so angry at her in the first place and just keep hitting her. Keep hitting her and let the ref break it up.” She repeated, as she playfully slapped the brunette on her ass and sent her on her way to the ring, following close behind her.

Late September, That Year

Jennifer and Theresa had only met in college but became fast friends since discovering that they lived two floors apart in the same dorm building and also shared the same discussion section for their general studies class. They'd been roughly inseparable since, spending most of their freshman year together and absolutely no one was surprised when they decided to move in with each other the following school year. They were a perfect pair: Jennifer was by a white girl from the Portland suburbs with cute, mousey features and a budding sense of independence evident in the streaks of green in her dark brown curls while Theresa was Filipino-American, a Biology major with wild eyes and long sunburn hair, still learning to balance business and pleasure.

The prefect pair. Until they weren't anymore.

Late September, That Year

It was surreal; a thing observed and not felt. Time slowed, begging her to commit this moment to memory. Objectively ordinary, personally enchanting.

Maybe it was just cool as fuck.

A clenched fist, lightly wrapped in leather and guided by bad intentions, sailing toward her face, only to stop desperately, tragically short of its destination and recede back toward the fury that’d sent it. She swore she could see the stitching on the 4oz glove, the ridges of the knuckles. Angry, impotent. The truth of a missed punch.

The moment would stick with her for years.

She’d leaned ever so slightly away from the straight right, the last in a flurry she’d let chase her around the cage, all the while slipping, leaning, taunting the danger. Her opponent’s inhale, deep exasperation evident, made one thing clear: there’d be no follow-up. Hell, that punch was the follow-up to one that’d missed even wider. This fight was a conversation and her opponent had spoken her piece for the moment.

Now came Simone’s rebuttal.

Later September, That Year In a MMA gym in the San Gabriel Valley, CA, USA....

“Ugh, do we have to?” Bailey pouted. Upstairs in the gym on a Tuesday night was the last place she wanted to be. Watching bits and pieces of her last tragic fight was the absolute last thing she wanted to do, but here she was, staring at the flatscreen. She'd watched videos of her fights before, including her only professional loss to date, but that video, that night, hadn't ended with her in an unconscious heap on the floor...

Her disdain emanated off of her in palpable waves, prompting her coach to put a warm hand on her 22 year old shoulder.

“C'mon Lee; I don't much like watching you lose either, but hell, we figure out what happened, why it happened, we can keep it from happening. Obviously it didn't end the way we wanted it, but it's not like it was bad from start to finish: you got a good solid takedown almost immediately.”

The young Texan woman began to soften up with a deep sigh. “So what should I be looking for?”

Written as a commission for a client who wanted fanfiction of 3 of his favorite characters

Cosmo Imai looked around his gym and sighed. It was true that their humble gym attracted a murderer's row of fighters and martial artists looking to improve themselves. But they'd spent so much time fighting, sweating, learning together that Cosmo knew their habits and styles nearly as well as his own.

He could scarcely imagine a situation where training and fighting weren't his favorite pastimes, but he could no longer deny to himself that he'd grown bored and this had grown stale.

He sipped from his water bottle and scanned the gym again, forcing a smile and a generic compliment to his latest training partner to hide his growing discontent. He made a note to reach out to some of the more eclectic fighter' s he'd met through his travels and see if any of them were still local.

The athletic 20 year old yearned for the sense of danger and uncertainty that had endeared him to fighting in the first place. His blonde ponytail bounced as he shook his head and subsumed the feeling beneath the simple joy of grappling. The dissatisfaction endured, but he couldn't defeat it by pouting and wishing anymore than he could become the world's best martial artist overnight. Results required effort.

January, the Year Everything Happened

“Hey Simone, are you here to talk shit or are you here to spar?” Natalie Turner asked, standing in what had formerly been a very focused fighting stance. Her blue mouthguard, still shiny with spittle, now clutched in the palm of her hand as she narrowed her brown eyes at her partner.

“Both, ideally.” Simone Williams grinned. There was no tension in her 5'10 frame, just brown eyes full of mischief and laughter creasing her face. She shrugged, baggy tee obscuring the athletic body beneath, palms of her red MMA gloves up towards the ceiling of the gym.

“Come on. I've got class in an hour and we still gotta catch the bus back to campus.” Natalie complained. “Waste your own time; some of us are trying to go pro.” She slid her mouthguard back in and waved on the other college freshman: Nat was done talking even if her friend wasn't.

Late September, The Year After Everything Happened

Teresa Paraiso knew they had the address right. She'd checked it three times and driven past it the day before just to make sure. At this point they probably thought she was casing the joint rather than coming to fight for the first time. But no amount of mindfulness and deep breathing could abate the anxiety in her chest.

“You get quiet and sweaty when you're nervous. Just stop it.” Jennifer Schwiezer deadpanned, leaning forward from the backseat of Nisha' busted little sedan to and face Teresa. Teresa's longtime roommate and training partner had agreed to accompany her alongside Teresa's longtime friend, Nisha Patel, who'd agreed to drive only on the condition that someone else be the designated driver on the way back. Teresa's tall, pale roommate maintained a mild enmity with most of her friends, including Nisha. The feeling was largely mutual: she and Jennifer might be thick as thieves but neither one had ever gelled with her roommate's friends.

”'Lucky Shot' is such a shit name for a bar.” Jennifer grumbled.

“What? Nah it's hilarious. It's a pun. It's cute.” Nisha protested. “It's a bar, and they host fights. Lucky shot? Get it?”

“I get it. It's stupid. Someone was trying too hard.” Jennifer shot back, and Theresa welcomed her friends' arguments sas a quick reprieve from her thoughts of her own fight. This wasn't the first time she'd had an organized fight: she'd appeared on Kelsey Drama's Beat, Prey, Love series a dozen times over her college career so far.

Alright, bear with me.

The yearslong assault on journalism and criticism, especially in gaming, makes sense to me when constellated among a few other trends. Others have likely tied these all together more completely or succinctly but you're reading me instead.

Media choice has increasingly become a stand-in for identity online (and only online). Rather than fandom being a facet of a fully fleshed out person, there's a growing temptation to define yourself by your media consumption. Late stage capitalism has reduced us to consumers.

Watching a friend or coworker out themselves as a Republican voter is jarring and upsetting and alarming: somewhere between watching a man open his trench coat to reveal a bomb strapped to his chest, and watching a man open his trench coat to reveal his naked body beneath.

(There is no good ending when a dude opens his trench coat in broad daylight. There is no good surprise waiting when a coworker says that he's “concerned about all this 'woke' nowadays.”)