Sagapic · Lore · Journal

Eight Limbs, One Heart

The Bracket

Chapter 14 · free to read

Eight names. Three rounds. One slot to the national ring, and four signatures at the bottom of the page deciding who fights whom.

Appointed in February. Between the night I took a cheekbone off a southpaw and the morning they printed the bracket.

Eleven names, all crossed. It took fourteen months. And underneath them, three more and then a name I had been drawing a line under since I was nineteen years old.

Three admissions in five months, and none of them mentioned to anybody. And a receipt from a border promotion, dated November, for an exhibition bout — a fifty-eight-year-old man with a dead knee taking a paid fight to top up the medication money.

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Next: chapter 15

Artwork and narration generated with AI.