Shattered Punches: In the rhythm of broken things.

The punch didn’t land the way it was supposed to.Neither did the second. Or the third.

I don’t remember why I didn’t stop. The boy kept coming at me, slender and insistent, like a note held too long in a song no one else could hear. Maybe he thought I’d back down. Maybe I thought I would, too. But I didn’t. Somewhere inside my chest, my heart had changed frequency—irregular now, mechanical, like a coin-operated jukebox skipping just enough to make the melody wrong.

I was seventeen. It was Detroit, which means everything and nothing at once. In my neighborhood, ambition smelled like gasoline and bled rust. I belonged to WyClef, a street gang that sounded like a misremembered jazz record. Names like that carried the weight of myth—ephemeral, dangerous, always almost true.

He lunged at me. Light, fast, all motion. His body slapped against mine like a wet shirt on a laundry line. I didn’t think. I never thought. I moved by echo—by reflex.

My arm found his neck, pulled him in like a memory too sudden to resist. His scalp under my palm felt intimate in a way that startled me. Warm, human. Like holding someone’s breath. Then, with a motion as instinctive as blinking, I slammed his head into the back of my car.

Once.Twice.The taillight took it quietly.

There was a music to it—submerged, wet, muffled like underwater drums. Bang, bang, bang. The sound didn’t come from the outside. It was inside me, filling a space between ribs. A strange kind of music. Music with no composer.

By the fourth blow, the red plastic cracked, letting light out in ways it was never meant to. That taillight had been part of my father’s Ford—a gray primer shell of a car, stubborn in its refusal to die. It was mine now, though it had never felt fully mine. After the plastic broke, something changed. The kid stopped fighting, but not really. Some part of him still resisted, twitching, like an unplugged radio that somehow keeps catching static.

He slid to the ground in silence, the kind of silence that smells like sweat and hot pavement. I stood over him, breathing heavily, though not from the fight. My body was fine. My mind felt bruised. I wasn’t sure what I had done, or why. Only that something had ended, and I hadn’t decided what.

The Ford sat there like a forgotten photograph. Static. Ghostlike.My first car. A gift or a burden, depending on the day. A six-cylinder clunker with a gear shift that felt like moving a bone in a corpse. I had tried to give it shape, painted it in flat gray like primer dreams. Added moon hubcaps, silver and stupidly bright, like hope on the wrong feet.Inside, the seats were wrapped in fake leather that made you sweat whether it was summer or not. There was a smell to that leather—warm plastic and old sugar, like memories sealed in Tupperware.

From the rearview mirror dangled a pair of foam dice. White spots. Innocent and dumb. They didn’t match anything—the cracked taillight, the gray paint, the blood—but they stayed. A leftover from someone else’s idea of cool. Maybe my father’s. Maybe no one’s.

I remember the taillight. That crack stayed with me like a scar in glass. I took it to a guy I knew. He didn’t ask questions. Custom work, he said. He replaced them with cone-shaped tail lights—two perfect red points that jutted out from the car like punctuation at the end of a sentence I hadn’t finished.

My friends said the car had tits now.I didn’t mind. It made people laugh. And laughter, in a place like ours, was rare enough to take seriously.

But the broken one——the original taillight——it was never really fixed.

Not inside me. Not in the story. Not in the memory.

Somewhere in the folds of my brain, I could still feel the weight of the kid’s body in my arms, the warmth of his skin, the way he’d fought until there was nothing left but silence.I can feel the way the fight drained from him, not like a switch, but like a bathtub slowly emptying, spiraling until there’s nothing but the residue of rage.I don’t know if I won that fight.

All I know is that the silence that followed didn’t sound like peace.It sounded like an actor forgetting his lines. At a play where the curtain would not drop.

The silence that makes you wonder if there is an ending.And if there was, were you the one who made it stop?