(nonfiction—mostly—about people and windows) This is a story about
by Ron Riekki
myself. And a bunch of other boxers.
We were staying at a hotel, maybe fourteen of us, in one room (or was it two?), but I just remember there were a ton of us in one room, laughing, talking loudly, about the fights, which went well, most of us winning, and I didn’t fight, but I was there to support, and the front desk called about a noise complaint (us) and I picked up the phone and I can’t remember what I said, but it wasn’t friendly and it was stupid and it did get a massive laugh from the room and I hung up, and I was acting nutty, because these were boxers and I didn’t want to be some scared nerd afraid to be an idiot frequently, so I was an idiot nerd in full idiot mode, and there was a knock on the door, and it was an official knock, and we all got silent and the walls got silent and the silence got silent and the floor creaked a little bit, because the floor didn’t want to be some scared nerdy floor afraid to make a peep, and there was another knock and we tried to hold in the laughter, and then we heard a key in the door, and someone whisper-yelled for everyone to pretend we were all asleep, which is just ridiculous, but it’s what he had to offer as a plan, and he was a boxer and he’d won that day, so he’s allowed to have that be the plan and I remember people diving under the blankets in the bed, and diving on the bed over the blankets so that there were three of them lying how you’d normally sleep but one moron who lied crisscross on top of their stomachs, and I remembered people pretending quickly that they had been sleeping on the floor, and someone ran by me and into the bathtub where he lied down and cuddled up with the fiberglass, and I was in a chair so I just closed my eyes three-quarters shut and pretended that people sleep in hotel chairs daily, and the lights went out and a guy who looked like he was made out of cardboard came in and he had his arms folded like he was a really tough librarian, but the boxers would have torn him into sixteenths if they wanted to, but the pseudo-tough management guy announced something like, “All right, that’s enough of this, all you need to pack your bags and get up out of here” and I remember this eruption where someone headed straight for the window and opened it and he leaped out because there were no bags, just our bodies, and it was like an infection, contagious, how we all knew we needed to do the same, and so all these arms and legs and heads and torsos started leaping, one after the other, out the window, over and over, throwing ourselves down onto the grass that hurt, onto the earth with its razor-y rocks, onto the ground that hated our skin, and we hobbled up, resurrected ourselves, bruised from earth and uppercuts, and we ran into the boxing-glove-colored darkness, and someone yelled, “Who paid for that room?” and someone else yelled, “Not me,” and we were free, and we were jogging contusions, and we were young, as young as Mike Tyson’s memory, and we could have done anything with our lives and most of them disappeared into the future, but I know one died in a car wreck, and another died of something that kills people, and another became a pharmacist and got two DUIs and somehow they let him keep being a pharmacist, but with restrictions of where he could work, and he makes a quarter of a million a year combined with his wife’s income, and he’s had two wives, and two kids, and I remember his mug shot, how he looked like Harry Potter if Harry Potter was addicted to hemorrhoid cream, and the moon that night wanted to fight the sky, kept urging the sky to throw the first punch, and I don’t know what happened, if the sky and moon ever fought or not, because I ran into someone’s car and someone else dove in through a backseat window, his second window of the night, as if our night was going to be countless last-second escapes through windows, and it was, and his legs were kicking out of the window, and we drove down the street like that, his legs kicking at the air and the stupid ugly cars going by, their inhabitants realizing that children were alive in this world and that they had car keys and fists and liquor and time and that the world will be destroyed one day and it will be because of history.
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Ron Riekki has been awarded a 2014 Michigan Notable Book, 2015 The Best Small Fictions, 2016 Shenandoah Fiction Prize, 2016 IPPY Award, 2019 Red Rock Film Fest Award, 2019 Best of the Net finalist, 2019 Très Court International Film Festival Audience Award and Grand Prix, 2020 Dracula Film Festival Vladutz Trophy, 2020 Rhysling Anthology inclusion, and 2022 Pushcart Prize. Right now, Riekki’s listening to John Barry’s “Bond Smells a Rat” from the Diamonds are Forever film score.
Portrait of my favorite chair: I can’t really draw, so I’ll try to describe it—called The Dragon’s Lounge Chair, it is a cross between the $28 million dollar The Dragon’s Chair and the Marc Newsom Lockheed Lounge Chair worth $2.9 million, but instead of it averaging out to be worth about $15 million, instead it’s worth about $84 billion dollar and I found it in an alley and dragged it into my overpriced apartment in Ann Arbor and put it in the corner of my room where I can see the wall of the apartment complex next to ours perfectly through the cat-sized window and I like to sit it in and dream about the days when I could open my left eye easily and not how it is now, a battered old cereal box that reminds mirrors of Jim Harrison.
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