The Art of Giving Way

by Ishelle Payer

2021 Flash Contest Honorable Mention

We practice jiujitsu on the back lawn, Annie and me, attacking in turn. We don’t have to be strong, our father says. We only need our opponents to be strong. We can use their strength against them. He presses his palm against our bellies. Center of gravity. Aim there. He stands behind us, demonstrating how to lock the elbow, the neck, the knee. Carefully, he applies pressure to each and our breath catches. He’d never hurt us, our father. But he could. He is showing us that someone could. 

Jiujitsu, he says, means the art of giving way. When he says when, I go limp in his arms, and he eases me onto the grass. Think of heavy things, he whispers, and Annie takes me by the arms, drags me in circles through the lawn. Deadweight makes you not worth the trouble, which means safe.

When we are home alone, we are not to tell anyone over the phone that our parents aren’t there. We are not to tell anyone at the door. We are not to open the door to strangers. If we hear the sound of a baby crying, we are not to go outside to look. 

Our mother reads in the bedroom as the three of us watch Bloodsport, cheering for Van Damme. When the movie is over, the tattered VHS box becomes a boxing glove. In Annie’s room we close the door and take turns slapping each other across the face with the cardboard sleeve, cheeks reddening.

Cry uncle!

Cry matté!

We neither cry nor forfeit. We think heavy, think stone, think glossy Rushmore thoughts.

Other times, Annie ties a scarf around her eyes, and we play a version of Marco Polo through the house, only I am not allowed to speak. Find me, I say telepathically. 

For the first two years that we live in that house, there is a barren lot next door littered with broken bits of concrete and PVC piping. We clear a space just large enough for Annie to lie on her side. She closes her eyes, and I kneel in the dirt and debris beside her, kissing her hand, promising to avenge her. We take turns dying until it’s dark out, and then we go inside, which is the rule. 

As Annie and I lie crisscrossed on the couch, our father reaches over to pop the knuckles of our toes. He tickles the arches. Then he curls a fist against the instep, says, anyone grabs you from behind, stomp here. 

We ask our mother for table salt with which to blind our enemies. At school, I think heavy. I am the biggest of the broken up pieces of concrete that together Annie and I cannot move. 

When Annie gets her license, she is to park only in well-lit areas and approach the car with her keys already out, from the passenger’s side so that she circles the vehicle before unlocking it. If there is a van parked beside her, she is to enter from the opposite side. If she notices something tucked beneath a wiper blade, she is not to open the door to retrieve it. If when she backs up she hears a strange noise, she is not to get out of the car to inspect. She is not to loiter before backing out. She is not even to stop for an officer on the highway, but to take the next exit to a populated, well-lit area. She is to ask to see his identification. She is not to drive alone with a male passenger who isn’t Dad. The first principle of self-defense is awareness, he says.

My health teacher, a former teen mom, preaches abstinence, says it’s important to understand that it’s okay to say no. How, one of the girls asks, and the boys laugh and tease. Some of the girls, too. I want to rub salt in their eyes.

Yell fire, I can feel Annie, across campus in one of the portable buildings, say. And when the last of us has been taught to yell fire, I wonder how much will simply burn.

In the backyard, Dad mans the grill. When he steps inside to grab a clean plate for the burgers, Annie says, do you remember after they bought Mom’s car, Dad shutting us in the trunk? To prove that we could find the brake lights in the dark. We tapped on them with our fingernails so that he could hear. And when he opened the trunk, we shut it again, pulled the cord that he said not every car would have, and raised our arms for him to lift us up and out, no longer heavy, but—for a moment—almost weightless. 

The charcoal smolders, tongs hanging from the barbecue, juice dripping from the pinchers, the dogs licking at the concrete below. When our father emerges through the doorway, plate in hand, we lift our arms. He looks confused but smiles and raises his, too.

Published October 10th, 2021