I was the caped bat, wings flaring from my shoulders, whom the others followed down the hill, a girl leading all the boys in thundering descent, so he had to make a point of beating me, on that cold day, when the drifts and whistles of the snow creeping in the doors kept us inside playing marbles, where I won for keeps his tawny-eyed shooter, his favorite steelie, and all his blue-eyed cats. All of a sudden, he grabbed me, using his only lethal move, and I was on my hands and knees, like a dog on its belly, grabbed by the scruff of the neck. Yet he was not strong enough to hurt me, so we froze in a tableau of spectacle and shame before the other second-graders. I knew that I could grab him by the head and flip him over my shoulder onto the cold tiles and knew, too, it would seriously hurt him. I had already pummeled the bullies who locked my three-year-old sister out of the house, had stood in the chicken yard at the age of five and, waiting for the bus, bloodied the face of the eight-year-old who meant to teach me a lesson. But I paused that morning, for whatever reason, thinking my way through the fog of embarrassment into the deeper fog of anger, where something cleared into a brightness, a clearing within me, a kind of meadow — ground to stand on, air to breathe, and mercy in the world. I let him go, he let me go, we let each other live.
“Headlock” is reprinted from Bitters, by Rebecca Seiferle. © 2001 by Rebecca Seiferle. It appears here courtesy of Copper Canyon Press.
