Fight Like a Girl - Sheena Kamal Page 0,1

their minds.

It’s the women that stay.

They’re with you even when they’re not around. They give you pieces of their souls, jagged pointy things, and you can never give them back, no matter how much you want to. No matter how much these pieces cut you and make you bleed for them, over and over.

I have to tell you something.

The women of my family are both warriors and witches. Creatures of the night, vampires that haunt the dreams of Caribbean children, soucouyants who will suck the life right out of you and burn you with our flames.

I first begin to suspect this about my family after Mr. Abdi gives me a book about a soucouyant living in my hood. Fiction, he says. Yeah, right. Like women who take everything you have and keep wanting more could ever be some made-up shit in the pages of a book.

Another pinch from Ma tells me the service is finally over.

Mourners trail out and some of them even make it to our townhouse co-op in the east end of Toronto for the food part, which is probably what lured them to the service in the first place. They walk into the front door, past the boiler room, which we call the basement, and up the stairs to where the living room, dining room and kitchen are. There’s another floor with the bedrooms, but nobody goes up there to poke around because the food is laid out on the dining room table. People practically eat and run, muttering their condolences, and we try to find something new to say every time.

It’s an ordeal, but we do our best.

We are the saddest people you ever saw, but after everyone leaves our house with their bellies full of dhalpuri, curry channa and sahina, all of a sudden it feels different somehow. Lighter. Like how my arms feel at the gym after Kru makes me punch with weights for what seems like hours. Like they could float away.

I walk into the kitchen and I feel this airiness about Ma. The grief she should feel over my father’s death is suddenly somewhere in the wind, far away from here. Maybe her sadness joined him at a nearby rum shop—no doubt where his spirit flew when it exited his mutilated body. Even in her black dress, her face bare of makeup, her hair pulled tight into a bun, she’s light itself in this moment.

Which is weird, right?

And it’s like I’m waking up from a dream. I see the smile that my mother gives to my aunty Kavita. Pammy, our next-door neighbour, comes in and grins at them both. A pit of dread opens up inside me because it’s like I’m not even there and they’re sharing something I SHOULD NOT be seeing. Pammy’s inclusion in whatever’s happening here shocks me. We are the witchiest of warriors if we’re starting to corrupt the white people in the neighbourhood, too.

Make them into killers, like us.

one month earlier

two

In the warehouse district on the east side of the city, the Muay Thai gym I train at is tucked between two underground sweatshops that pretend in the daytime they’re legit clothing manufacturers. The ring has seen better days—

duct tape on the floor, the ropes and the posts

—but the mats aren’t revolting and the gear is disinfected at least once a week.

There isn’t much more you can ask for, really. Kru does his best, but he’s pretty busy, what with his plans to expand across the city and spread the joy of connecting shinbone to ribs. Fist to chin. Knee to solar plexus. Elbow to…you get it.

We call each other gladiators because we go out and fight for reasons beyond us. Reasons that nobody else can understand if you’re not part of it. We don’t even understand it, not really. Nobody is from here, or from Thailand, even, the birthplace of our sport, Muay Thai. Some people call us nak muay farang—foreign boxers. We’re from a couple dozen other countries at least, the knot at the centre of Canada’s cultural mosaic, where everybody is from somewhere else. Our origin stories are irrelevant here, because we all want the same thing.

That rush.

The Art of Eight Limbs, the Thai words that stutter off our tongues. They don’t sound right, even to us, but none of that matters. Not really. As long as we pay our respects, we get a pass to train. To fight.

I’m in the ring right now.

I do my Wai Kru, the pre-fight dance, and bow to