The Solid Right Cross

Flash Fiction by William Kitcher

She was good. Really good. Not perfect; her style was slightly sloppy, but not enough to attract undue close negative attention from the average passerby of life.

You see, she’d punched this guy at the end of the bar who’d been paying no attention to her with a right cross halfway up his jaw, the perfect place to make his head twist quickly, and propel him to the ground. She pretended to stagger forward due to her momentum, not quite smoothly enough to fool me into thinking it was legitimate, so I paid closer attention. I’d settled my bill already and was dying for a smoke, but I had to watch this.

As buddy went down, she pulled his wallet out of his back pocket as he fell on his face.

She straddled his body, probably wondering if he was going to turn into a corpse, and yelled, “Don’t you ever touch me, ya piece a shit!”

That was a nice touch. The innocent man couldn’t now respond to her because he was unconscious and bleeding out of his nose in a design that looked like a Rorschach blot.

She stepped back toward the bar, threw a twenty on it, said to the bartender, “You have a lot of assholes in here,” and left.

The bartender said, “That’s what we’re known for.”

I left the bar, lit a smoke, took three quick drags, threw it away, and caught up with her at the corner of First and Montgomery. “I like what you did there,” I said.

“Get the fuck outa here.” She put her arm out at me, and I’m smart enough to get out of arm’s reach of people who can knock marks unconscious, especially when they’re bigger than I am.

“No shit,” I said, taking a step back. “I saw what you did. I like your style. A little ragged. The fake staggered step forward, not so good. The yelling that he touched you. A little too loud given the circumstances. But the idea was brilliant, and your right cross, well, in the perfect place. The result speaks for itself. Listen, I’m in the same business myself. I watched you. You’re really good. And I can help you. We could be a helluva team.”

She relaxed and seemed curious. She said, “Let’s talk.”

“Do you want a smoke?” I said.

“Sure.”

“Let’s move off the street,” I said, and backed into an alley between a jewelry store and an abandoned drugstore.

I took the pack of smokes out of my pocket, extracted two, handed her one, lit my smoke with my lighter, and passed her the lighter.

As she focused on the flame, I smacked her with a right cross in the middle of her left jaw. She fell back but, as the wall of the alley was only a foot behind her, she seemed to me to be just standing there.

Then she slid down the wall, stunned like a fly hitting a window.

I went through her pockets until I found the stolen wallet. It had three twenties in it. I took them and threw the wallet away.

She tried to get up, and I pushed her over again, then disappeared into another world.

I’m not overly proud of what I did, but a guy has to make a living, right? Government and business do this all the time, so why should I care?

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Bio: Bill Kitcher’s stories, plays, and comedy sketches have been published, produced, and/or broadcast in Australia, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Czechia, England, Germany, Guernsey, Holland, India, Ireland, Nigeria, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, the U.S., and Wales. His stories have appeared in Fiery Scribe Review, Ariel Chart, New Contrast, Spinozablue, Eunoia Review, Defenestration, Yellow Mama, and many other journals. His comic noir novel, “Farewell And Goodbye, My Maltese Sleep”, the second funniest novel ever written, was published in 2023 by Close To The Bone Publishing, and is available on Amazon.

Cover photo by: Pexels/Francesco Ungaro

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