Victoria Leigh Bennett
The Strongest Man
Author’s Note: Silly But Serious Content Warning—Though this story was written by Victoria Leigh Bennett, its composition came about due to a collaboration between the author and “Jeremy Ware writes palindromes @pdromeprompt” on Twitter. Every day on Twitter, Jeremy puts up several palindromes, and in response to many of them, Victoria has tweeted back a short paragraph further elaborating the story suggested by them. “The Strongest Man” came from Jeremy’s palindrome of January 20th, 2022, and I quote: “Arena? Brutal. I, after big nite, emailed Delia: meeting? I, Bret, fail at urban era.” There you have it.
Delia was nervous. She was immediately resistant to dating Bret, the man of huge, beefy muscles and sweat. (There must be lots of sweat–and cuts, scrapes, bloodshed, bruises, even broken bones, or damaged internal organs.) Her imagination ran riot. She simply didn’t prefer men who fought, who bullied, who punched and kicked and got all badass on other men. And he had better never do that to her; she wouldn’t let herself consider it. But Bret had invited her by email; he was a friend of her brother Rodney’s; she felt obligated to go out with him just once. For argument’s sake. There would be an argument with Rodney if she didn’t. It didn’t eliminate her prejudice that Bret had managed to write an email on an actual computer (his cell phone was broken) or that he had a computer. There was no arguing with the size and shape of the man nor with the fact that he went to RAF Club. Every Tuesday, like Rodney. Of Rodney, she had already despaired, even though he was wiry, spry, and small, because he egged fighters on, bet on them, and was trying to get into the organizer’s ring.
When she first heard Rodney raving about the “RAF Club,” bragging that he had a subscription, she was impressed: “Is that something to do with the British Royal Air Force?” she asked, thinking of dapper, handsome young officers on leave, wearing their spiffy uniforms and speaking in enchanting versions of English, all different from the ones of Brooklyn. Her fantasies were quickly shattered.
“Now where would you get a crazy idea like that?” mocked Rodney. “Why would I hang around with a bunch of pongy bastards from England? No, stupid, it’s the Raw All-Fight Club of Brooklyn! All kinds of fighting, different styles every week. Jesus Christ! The Royal Air Force! You’ve been reading too many of those nancified romances.” And he had left it at that.
Until now. Now that he was comfortable with the fighters, he was haunting some on days off; his closest bud was Bret Callahan. Delia had come to despise the man’s very name: it seemed that her brother regarded her as a relish to be offered like a special honor to his friend, so persistent was he in attempts to force a date with the man she saw as only another brute. She had seen Bret at a distance twice in his old Buick when he dropped off Rodney at his and Delia’s building stoop in front of their duplex. She maintained her dignity as a remote office worker for a literary publisher, which had become an advantageous position to be in since Covid had begun. She was already used to remote work, used to the rhythms of structuring her own hours and work patterns. All she had to do differently was what any responsible person did: get shots and wear a mask when around other people. Rodney fussed because she wore one around him, but since he kept going to club meetings where he couldn’t swear to it that everyone was vaccinated and didn’t want to be pressed about mask-wearing, she kept to her treatment of him as a potential carrier. He protested that he’d had shots, but she stuck to it and wore her green or blue mask every time he came over to her half of the building.
So Rodney had said he’d like to fix her up with Bret “just for the hell of it, you know, you never get out on a date anymore. There are places to go where it’s safe, I’ll tell him about your agenda.”
“My agenda? What I’m wondering is, what’s your agenda? Why all this interest in making me go out with your brutal friends? You’ve never done that before.”
“I haven’t been such good friends with anyone before as I am with Bret; not for a long time. And he’s a tame customer, you’ll see. Give him a chance.”
“He looks like the Jolly Sepia Giant; he’s all tanned up as if he’s got spray on.”
“Not usually. Guys just wear that stuff to fight, it makes them look good on the floor.”
“You say my books are ‘nancified,’ in your homophobic way, but then you go to a club where your friends wear cosmetics to please each other.”
But she had decided to go. Now, here she stood, feeding ducks with Bret: Central Park, which had been a bit of a trip; surprisingly, he got parking in a calm thoroughfare, and allaying her initial suppositions, he showed no signs of injury. He proposed they take the considerable walk to the park. Not the date she had imagined. No sweat, nothing but a faint, pleasant aroma that she could barely smell through her mask; he wore a proper surgical one.
It was after the ducks had begun to pall that they heard a weepy little sound under the bench behind them; they hadn’t noticed before. They turned; there was a tiny orange and black kitten—so small, just a mere scrap—peering up at them. It had an injury on one paw.
“A kitten? Here? And it’s hurt!” said Delia, sympathetic yet unwilling to pick it up. She had a cat, didn’t want another, and didn’t feel like taking a trip to the shelter. “Well, I can’t take it.”
Bret was silent, his back to her. She heard an indistinct sound. He, ridiculous in his bulk, bent down and picked up the feline fluff. She heard him again, this time clearing his throat. When he turned around with the piece of tiny life pressed to his chest, she saw tears running down his face; the mask caught them. “I’ll take it,” he said.
Delia was wrenched with compassion, hated him for not conforming to her expectations. Then, the breeze blew and stirred the warmth that had been falling on them all along from the sun; abruptly, she was in love, though whether just with a fighter or with a fighter and a kitten, she didn’t know.
Victoria Leigh Bennett (she/her). Greater Boston, MA area, born WV. B.A., Cornell University, M.A. & Ph.D., University of Toronto. Website: creative-shadows.com. In-Print: Poems from the Northeast, 2021; Scenes de la Vie Americaine (en Paris) [in English], 2022. Both available from Amazon. Between Aug. 2021 and Sept. 2022, Victoria will have been published at least twenty-one times with: Olympia Publishers, Roi Faineant Literary Press, The Alien Buddha Press, Barzakh Magazine, Amphora Magazine, The Madrigal Press, Discretionary Love, Winning Writers, Cult of Clio. Current WIP: 9th Novel/CNF/Fiction/Poetry. Twitter: @vicklbennett. Victoria is disabled.