closed for: @greermarch
location: Retrograde
Stale sweat had a way of making a room feel long empty, as if the spirits of dancing feet bouncing across springy vinyl and curling husks of knuckle tape had just slipped away into closing time hours before.
She prayed with neatly tacked fists. The noise vacuumed behind her out of focus and she buried herself in the metronome of a swinging bag. A pendulum hinge squeaked, little rusty creaks back and forth, back and forth like a lullaby from a long ago childhood. Rob twisted her shoulder, arm thrusting from the press of her heel to the place where her nails hung moons against the meat of her palms.
Peace — there was a different kind of peace in letting the frustrations, the pains, the things that she couldn’t ever bring herself to say, out like this.
Chalky must floated in chunks of talcum powder and stiff foam, unbothered save for the freckling silhouette wrapping her very petite frame. `Usually, around the evening, she was left to her own devices ( people sprinkled about usually on a treadmill or lifting weights ) but tonight she heard the steps padding through the halls until it stopped right behind her. After a moment longer, Rob stepped away, the escaped strands of hair sticking to her brow and neck, her lungs spasming open.
Reaching for her towel, she turned; confirming that there was indeed someone else behind her. Her face was familiar but Rob couldn’t exactly pin-point the familiarity.
“You can go ahead,” Rob gestured, “I was just finishing up.”
Past professors and mentors had often looked down at hands, splattered with brilliant purple and black, with disdain. She would try to explain how it was always her father, now over three thousand miles away, who would wrap them with such precision and care that they would be fitted just right: not too light in order to protect against the blow of punches and just enough so the wrap wouldn’t bulge and shift. They would just shake their heads, reminding her that those same hands were what she was supposed to be using to craft her stories. Her hands were made for pens, not punching bags, they insisted.
In the years following her father’s passing, Greer would spend extra time, attempting to master the same technique of her father with the memories of his careful movements still burning in the back of her head. The bruises she would find speckling her skin the next morning while typing away another story didn’t mind her, but keeping this art — his art — alive was vital to her.
Now with her novel underway, her boxing gloves and tape had been left sitting in a corner of her home for months. Running had been kept up, but if she wasn’t sleeping or eating, she was writing.
Hitting a writer’s block on this particular day, however, had prompted her to recover her old gloves and tape and head to Retrograde. The gym had always been comforting, like an old friend, and so despite the months spent away, she easily found her way to the back towards the punching bags and speed balls. Her eyes caught someone else on the bag that she had been making her way towards, but not wanting to bother them, she hangs back both to give them space and allow her enough time to stretch ( she was bound to be stiff and rusty after-all ). The boxer was good, very good in-fact, but Greer watched carefully as each time they jabbed, their hips rotated. In a fight, it would have gave them away just enough for the other fighter to take note. Too much rotation, and you could actually throw yourself off balance.
“Oh are you sure? I don’t mind waiting,” she replies immediately, but then, as she registers the other woman’s face, her smile forms deep and warm, dimples protruding, “You work at Sea of Ink, right?” Realizing it may be a bit strange to say, especially given that she had never been tattooed by her, Greer backtracks, “I’ve been in a few times for touch-ups, but um.... your work, it’s good. But now I realize that isn’t something you probably want to hear when after working out...” she’s rambling again, and she knows it, trying to find an in to help give a bit of advice on the slight error she saw.
