As a child, violence was a geography I could visualize: a slab of earth in the Minnesotan suburbs, with a rock garden and two pink azaleas, a geography from which I could flee. It spanned to the neighbor’s forked metal fence, whose sharp black tines one day unzipped the belly of a doe that hadn’t leapt quite high enough. Speared and suspended, she bleated pathetically in the pale blue light. Dew and blood beaded the grass. Her organs, bright skeins of pink and maroon, had slipped out and into a pile on the property line. I was still young when we found her. My father and I stood on one side, our neighbor on the other. There was nothing to do but watch. After some time the last bit of fight went out of her, the soft curve of her neck slackened, and her head fell forward in death. The two men lifted her corpse off the spike and moved it onto the ground. I watched as my father dragged the doe by the legs through our yard, down towards the woodshed where the cottonwood stood. It was the neighbor’s fence, but it was my father’s land, his body to handle.

I can’t remember if we ate her, but knowing my father I am certain we did.

For years she returned to me often. Time passed and my memory narrowed, the details reduced to a retinal flash: woolen cord of intestine, red-pink clot on the ground, blood ribboning from the mouth. Her image joined a growing collection of things I had observed from within the bounds of our property. There was my father and his fits. The punishments in the basement and an unexplained hole in the wall. There were the afternoons he spent blowing off steam from the porch, angling his rifle at the spined boughs of the Colorado blue spruce, shooting perched crows down to the ground. The coyotes, the squirrels. Corpses of animals studding the yard. And then there was the rare vein of tenderness, how my father — whenever he shot a pheasant or turkey — would preserve their severed wings in white layers of Borax, serving them to me as gifts. In lieu of toys, my closet filled with these tokens of violence: an antler, rodent bones, feathers and wings, and in a small paper bag crimped at the top, a lone cobbled talon curled to a fist.

After a childhood spent observing my father’s moods, I had come to believe something fixed about violence: that fury alone was its precursor. I had grown too familiar with his penchant for threats, the flash of a flat palm contacting a wall. His footfall, like thunder, moving over the floor.

Although once in a while the doe came to mind, and I found myself pausing. I would consider the wings in my closet, the bones in brown bags. The rough contours of a contradiction emerging, yet to be named. When he dragged the doe’s slack body behind him that day, something in my father’s behavior had given me pause. He was moving more slowly than usual — brows furrowed, mouth bowed and nearly forlorn. He had lifted the corpse with a reverent gentleness and eased it to the ground. He had even murmured a prayer.

These body parts, too, would be carefully carved and served to me later, buttered and seared for only an instant, the way venison was always prepared in our household — loin still cool at its center, blood pooled on my plate. For me he always reserved the softest cut of the animal — a diffuse sort of love I couldn’t yet name. We prayed over the doe before we ate that night, my father’s hands clasped like parentheses, as if cupping a meaning that seemed to elude me.

I remember the first time I sought out this meaning in earnest. I was seven years old, chicken-legged and rashy-faced, huddled behind the schoolhouse with the rest of my second-grade class. I remember how the building’s shadow opened over us, cool and dark, like a refrigerator door. Beyond its dark edges, brightness scalded the playground. The sun was a hard white stone in the sky.

It was a hot month, nearly summer. The dry heat in Minnesota had scorched the earth tawny. Anything not sheltered by tree canopy had gone stringy and dry, the stuff of birds’ nests and campfire starters. My body, too, had wizened: my lips were kiln-cracked and limned bloody, my spit gummy and thick. The creases of my palms glittered with sweat. Even in the shade, we squinted at one another. My upper lip savored of salt; beneath it, the gristle of brown blood. Every morning I could taste the new places my lips had split open in the dry air.

A group of children were lined up in front of me, giddy. The boys were most eager, but several of the girls squawked for their right to an earlier turn. Shoes scraped gravel. It had begun with a season of contests, innocent tournaments of will: Who could swing the highest, jump the furthest? Who could race fastest from the canteen to the pond, from the pond to the swing set, and back? Who could climb the tallest bough on the gnarled oak, or break the widest branch with the force of a karate chop? Each time the stakes pitched higher, the contest more grueling.

That day it had started with Tyler Jacobsen. He let every boy in our second-grade class give him a snake bite. One by one each child grabbed Tyler’s forearm with both of their hands, twisting in opposite directions and igniting a friction burn. Around him boys gathered — a living blossom of boys’ limbs, tenor voices, scraped-raw shins — and twisted the pink flesh of his arm red beneath their wanting fingers. The pain was cumulative, and with each new snake bite, his skin grew darker.

Then, Drew Bellingham, the boy who used to beat me at recess with branches until my father threatened murder, let each boy stamp on the toe of his sneakers with his heel. A couple times he grunted and whinnied, but ultimately he performed as promised: he withstood.

From the sidelines I marveled. At the time I had no words for my wonder, only wide eyes that drank in everything.

I coveted the beauty of it. It was unlike the violence I knew at home, the way my father foreclosed conversation with screams or a strike to the wall. It had a lifegiving gravity that gathered the boys around it, like the petals of a flower affixed to a stem. There was something raw about it, even glamorous. This new sort of violence had a heartbeat, thrived in the sunlight. It bloomed.

That year, I’d hit my first growth spurt, though I still fell several inches short of the other children. I was slim as a grasshopper leg, a girl with green eyes and a stammer that snagged on every phrase that I uttered. My smallness gave me everything to prove. I didn’t fit in, but I wanted to. I wanted to so badly that each night in bed it burned a hole through me, like a coal sinking through snow. I could feel it in my throat, a dull ache, a hot sadness. I saw them harming themselves, harming one another in their dazzling new way, and I wanted to belong to it.

I pushed my way into the mass, proud elbows creating space. I cleared my throat and felt the heat rise in my cheeks as I handed myself over.

I offered the only remarkable thing that I had at that age: my endurance. Snake bites were nothing, I challenged. Heel stomping, nothing. I dared each child to hit me, girls included — boys were weak, I warned, and girls would hit harder. This whipped them up exactly the way I expected it to.

Here were the rules upon which we agreed: Each person must hit me as hard as they can, and it must be in the face.

They lined up, arms akimbo, eyes narrowed to slits, waiting their turn to do just this.

“What are you waiting for?” I finally said. There was a knot in my belly and I was tired of waiting. Drew Bellingham, who for months had kept himself from beating me on threat of expulsion, stood at the front of the line. His grin was eager but hesitant, like a dog that had been promised an entire ham.

“Do it.”

The children cheered. I raised my chin.

Here was my promise to them: no matter how hard they hit me, I would not cry.

On a warm evening in Vancouver, James and I work our way in circles around the ring. His eyes are narrowed, chin tucked tight to his chest. We negotiate through punches: He jabs and I block, he counters and I roll. He charges me often, throwing his weight behind his black gloves, chasing me into the corners and ropes. This strategy normally works. He wears me down, punch by punch, until my energy flags. Today is no different. For a moment I lose focus, and I know I’ve been caught. The next punch lands low, James’ knuckles angling up from the belly towards the liver. My entire body seizes. In an instant I fold over his forearm, limp and pulsing. A dark clot of pain forms behind my eyes, and I gasp.

I see this painful side of sparring as a labor of love, like wedging clay, working out pockets of air to prevent cracks in the kiln. It is a brutal sort of kindness. Every time James hits me, my affection for him widens like an eye opening inside of me.

“Are you okay?” he says, his voice husky with excitement. He leans over me. I can feel droplets loosen from his hair, falling from him onto me in a shower. James is a huge man and sweaty by default. Each time we spar he weeps gallons. Despite this, he only ever smells of tap water or the wind on a cool day. This is something I like about him.

I’ve belonged to this boxing gym since I was twenty-three. To fight is both new and old to me, like working an atrophied muscle. For many years since moving to Canada I had never raised a hand to anything or anyone; I feared the implications undergirding even the smallest violence. I struggled to catch hold of its slippery edges, how it could feel intimate one moment and hateful the next. At eighteen, fresh to Montreal and shell-shocked by the calm monotony of my new life, I sometimes ran my tongue over my bottom lip and marveled at the raised ridge of an ancient scar. A memory from my girlhood, back when I allowed a group of children to brutalize me in the summer heat for sport. I remember a month of yellow pus. Sleepless nights, a dull throb anchoring the darkness. The clean shine of Vaseline applied and reapplied. Then followed a dry sort of healing, the alarm of fresh blood from a scab peeled and re-peeled, a single remaining gash reduced to the width and white of a whisker. And later, as I grew older, I remember the way the mark mellowed to a dimple beneath my lip, passably natural from afar. These days, no one even notices it.

James’ figure eclipses the fluorescents. I am even smaller beneath his shadow. I can’t speak yet, so I nod — more than I need to. I stare at the freshly waxed floor and a pair of flat, glossy eyes gaze back at me. It takes me a moment to realize that, beyond my building tears and the fog of gym lights, I am staring at my own dull reflection. Yes, I nod, yes, I am okay. I gulp air and lay my hands across my knees. Liver shots are the worst: All boxers know this.

I was eighteen when I first crossed the border into Canada, my Minnesotan accent still thick in my mouth and most hard lessons still ahead. At that age, putting distance between my new self and old felt vital. I had considered, briefly, moving across state lines instead, but that felt like a low leap — a dangerous half-measure. The new border felt secure, like a salt circle that kept a hungry spirit at bay, signifying a forever-end to something festered and unhealed. I visualized this past life in the rear-view, its likeness a smudged streak in passing.

It didn’t take me long to discover that the violence I feared contained itself to the body, not land. Early into my new life, on a summer’s evening in Montreal, two men pinned me to a brick wall a few blocks from home. The streets of the Plateau were empty, drums of the Tam-Tams echoing from afar like a jumping pulse. Shoulder-to-shoulder, the two of them wrung me to tears like a dishrag.

Even now, the moment remains clear to me. I remember their yeasty breath, how the earth, sweat, and tobacco dried to a rind on their skin. I remember the way the first man winked at me, his mouth a halfway-smile, the rude shape of a question mark. Then the smart of pain. The grunt of surprise produced somewhere low in my stomach. A proprioceptive awareness, wordless and roiling, frothed up from the wet bank within me. It occurred to me that I wanted to fight. I grabbed the shaft of my umbrella and angled the pointed end blindly into flesh, over and over, snarling and feral. The realization dawned: violence runs in the blood of everything, everywhere. For me, it took leaving the country to learn this. For the doe from my childhood home, it had been as simple and as quietly done as jumping a fence.

James leans but doesn’t touch. His shadow falls across me, cuts a shape into the paneled glare of fluorescents. Between my seizing breath and the urgent throb in my side, the intensity of the moment finally spills over. The room grows swimmy and wet. I freeze in place, mortified by my tears.

“Take a minute,” he tells me. “Just breathe.”

I smile into the floor. “Yeah,” I say. “Go get some water, stop looking at me.”

He does what he is told. James is good that way. Free of his eyes, I slowly right myself, wrapping one arm against my waist as if my limb is a bandage. Thankfully, no one else in the gym has stopped to look; around me, other boxers circle in a waltz with their partners, poised on the balls of their feet, eyes snapping and alive. I turn, pretending to wipe my nose with my hand wraps, and wipe my eyes instead. The room becomes steady and dry. I cast a glance over to James as he fills his water bottle and I allow myself to yearn in a gentle way that means nothing and goes nowhere. I have a crush on him, but he is engaged. It is that simple. When he returns I shimmy my hands back into my gloves.

I square with James, nodding my readiness, and begin to circle. I watch his expression loosen, social convention relaxing into something uncomplicated, innate. His lips part. His dark eyes widen with demand. In these eye-of-the-storm moments, when the spar has just begun and neither boxer has thrown, I find myself wondering if he ever wears his engagement ring beneath his hand wraps, if it lays flat against his skin, a tightness that never yields.

He doesn’t, of course. I know that. It would damage the hand, the ring, and perhaps even the glove. It would be too painful. Still, as we court one another on the floor, I wonder anyhow. I meditate on the small, irrational ways he might allow pain entry into his life. These days I find pain has become simpler to me. A static in the air that builds like electricity and finds the shortest path out. It means nothing, it wants for nothing. It simply passes. Like the tears that arrested me only moments ago — the pain now having swept its way through me — it is as though nothing ever happened at all.

James senses my distraction and monopolizes it. He jabs and I slip, he jabs and I catch. We ease back into motion, the raw edge of instinct reclaiming our conversation. Now only our bodies speak. My thoughts blot clean from the mind. My tense shoulders go loose, and I catch the edge of a smile from between his gloves.

The evening after the beating on the schoolyard, I lay in bed and probed my mincemeat face with my fingertips and recounted the events on the playground. My cheeks and lips throbbed. I could feel my heartbeat on the surface of my skin. There was a gash, right below my lip, that had been seeping blood since the afternoon. The sharp, eager red had slowed. Now it oozed something dark. This was the spot that hurt most.

I was not the sort of child who cried. My father had drawn this type of moisture out of me, the way salt strips wetness from a wound. Whenever I grew misty he turned my chin up with a thumb and said he would give me something to cry about. This threat was quick to dry out my sadness. On the playground I stood with my eyes up and held focus, my guard open, fists arranged in balls at my sides. I did not grunt like Drew or Tyler had. I did not cry. I did not look away. Still, my body wept.

Once the bleeding began, some children grew too skittish to continue, as if the blood was somehow a surprise. The group thinned. In those years of soft edges and baby fat, my chin was the only sharpness about me; it remained lifted like an arrow, pointed beyond the schoolyard. Dripping.

Now, out of sight and tangled beneath the safety of my bedsheets, I replayed this scene over and over in my mind. The memory, in all its fresh brightness, was just like my other wounds. Except it was more alive. It did not run along my skin; it traveled deeper. A low ache. I felt the heft of it on my chest.

Although I was not surprised by what my classmates had done, the reality of their violence — the blood, their knuckles, and in one case, a sharp thumbnail pressed with the precision of a scalpel into the cleft of my bottom lip — drew a hot gash of feeling down my abdomen. I felt like I was spilling out. Falling apart. Each time I remembered it, I spasmed. Twisted. The sheets could not keep up; I became knotted in linens.

I thought of their laughter and grew smaller. As small as an insect, a piece of gravel, a down feather. Blood rushed to my cheeks; the shame was unbearable.

It had been fun for all of us, of course. For me, to appear stronger than I was. For them, to do something hideous. I had been given exactly what I asked for. Why was I so disappointed?

I recalled how the boys organized themselves on the smooth swath of blacktop, standing elbow-to-elbow, their eyes locked and flaming. Even as they wounded one another, an unmistakable flash of something — trust certainly, but something deeper even, an unruly sort of compassion — crossed their expressions like a volt of electricity. Their smiles were uncomplicated, laden with admiration. They were proud of one another and proud of themselves. Somehow, their violence was bringing them closer. Fusing each boy together like the weld of a joint. This was the feeling I had wanted to claim, the secret desire now refusing to clot. Not injury for its own sake, but for what I had seen it enable, how it seeded wild blossoms of friendship. I was hopeful that after the display, some ineffable alchemy of guilt, curiosity, and awe would coax the others to change their mind about me. To like me better than they did before. And then, as if by magic, I would belong a little more than yesterday. And then, the next day, a little more than that. Slowly onwards, a process that extended to infinity. Less myself, more them.

This was what I had hoped for, but the idea did not take. I was only a bloodied thing, swollen from every angle, and the scars would — and still do — remain. For all the dark earth heaped upon it, belonging was a seed that never germinated.

For the first time that night I held myself. Hard, as though holding all the parts of my body together. I whispered into the silence that I was okay, over and over. I did this until part of me believed. Then, with little else left to do but allow the moment to have its way with me, I pressed my bloodied face into the linens and cried.

Weeks have come and gone since James and I have seen one another; in the time that has passed, he has cut his hair, and my bruises have dulled to grass stains on the soft knoll of my belly.

James gets close when he spars. He likes to match up glove-to-glove, my purple gloves against his black ones, so that he can look me in the eye when he rallies on my sides. His body is the shape of a barrel, shoulders the width of an ox. I think it must feel good for him to fight me, producing the same satisfaction as collapsing an aluminum can under one’s shoe. I am half his size, possibly even a third. Why he pairs with me is a mystery. He is stronger, taller, and years more experienced. Perhaps he does so out of pity, knowing how few men are willing to spar with a woman. Or maybe he likes someone easy to control. Regardless, I choose to see his partnership as a kindness. Without him, I would have no one to box at all.

A tattoo — perhaps a lizard, a dragon, or another scaled thing — snakes up his arm and behind the sleeve of his wife beater. Because I have never seen him shirtless, I have never known which creature it is. I like this secret part of him. Wondering gives me something to do. Whenever we spar, all I can see of it are the tiny ink scales, like a hundred blue-black raindrops, undulating together as his muscles ripple beneath. A mimicry of armor.

There is a posture the two of us often adopt called a high guard. By this I mean: the boxer raises both gloves to the face, flush to the cheekbones, and fights from behind the tight wall of their fists. It is an easy way to block hits to the head, but also allows fighters to bully each other — and both of us do. Like two bighorn sheep, James and I often find ourselves butting gloves, heads sealed to curled fists. We foist our full body weight onto the other, locked in a grapple until one of us yields.

Today is no different. At one point we convene at the center of the ring, our heads butting, guards high and pressed against one another. A classic game of chicken begins. I have been sparring with James for a year and know his tastes. His violence is all pressure, slow terror that rises and rises, then overtakes. He leans and I lean. For him, on account of his height and weight, this gambit is as simple as falling forward, allowing his gravity to do the work. For me, it takes everything I have to withstand, to bear my fists parallel and not relent. It is a feat of all of my muscles to hold steady without collapsing beneath him.

Our gloves, perfectly aligned at the cheek, form a narrow hallway. We watch one another through the space it creates. I think to myself: we are touching, but not. The way he looks at me now, his eyes dark like pits of gunpowder, gives me a queasy feeling. Has she ever seen you this way? I want to ask.

As I expected them to, my legs begin to quiver. My knees buckle with weight. James and I have grappled this way many times. In our previous bouts, my insecurity has spoken for me. I have always wanted to prove to him, and to myself, that I am exceptionally strong — that, beneath his extraordinary weight, I won’t falter in the ways I have in my past. I consider the scar beneath my lip, the misshapen healing that cleaves its curve in two parts. Or how my father once towered over me, the balls of my shoulders like marbles in his hands. Even now it is remarkable to me: how easily he could manipulate my movement, jerking me up or pushing me forward, and me offering no more resistance than a door swinging closed. Since I’ve started sparring with James I have kept myself guarded, painting myself into an untenable corner: despite being his partner, I’ve wanted to communicate, somehow, that he is not capable of pushing me around. That I won’t allow him to hurt me.

Only I have, and I do. It is the only clear thing, in fact, I have ever offered him. The realization dawned the last time I was in the ring, made immutable by the heat of my tears, the gasping throb of my ribs. After our fight I had considered the way his tenderness arrested me, his shadow layering over my own, voice warmed-over with concern. How my pain, despite causing it, had so clearly mattered to him, and that this care was essential to my learning and his. He wanted to help me and he wanted to hurt me; It was time I held these things as one and the same. I remembered the boys on the playground, their hands mapping the flesh of each other’s bodies, mining one another’s pain for its intimacy. How their violence had produced a soldering heat, not coerced but desired, the prerequisite that informed a new species of friendship. James was my partner and I trusted him — of course he had hurt me. He was helping me learn. And, surely, he trusted me to do the same. I had spent the bulk of our spars constantly on defense, enduring his violence but seldom returning it. It occurred to me, finally, that he might have been waiting on me all this time.

This epiphany released me. For several weeks I spent my spare time rehearsing our most recent fight, replaying the scene in the gym in my mind. I imagined James’s arms barred up against mine, his heft traveling down to the balls of my feet. I had closed my eyes and felt it vividly — his sweat, his heat, his conquering stance. With my feet I retraced my movements, recalling my bullish posture, the gravity I had for so long attempted to conjure. Then, instead of maintaining form, I broke it. If I could not push, I would pull. On my feet I was as light as a dancer, drawing back, pivoting on one heel like a door thrown violently open. I would be there one moment, then not at all. I imagined him toppling. All that weight for nothing.

Now I wait until James is built against me, full weight stacked against my gloves, like a tower of bricks. When my thighs begin to shake and groan, I know I have him.

Just like I’ve practiced, I move. I angle out from beneath him, swinging wide with my feet. I move so quickly that he staggers forward, his stance disintegrating midair — he topples like a building without support pillars.

And now I do the thing I have always hesitated to do — no longer defending, but attacking. Instead of trailing back, I arc forward. I imagine myself as a dagger, thin, lithe. I am small, the way I need to be. I take my fist and cut upwards, drive myself into his falling body; the power of his gravity and my fist meet halfway in the air. I hit him so hard in the abdomen that my knuckles seem to gasp.

It is the first true, devastating blow I’ve ever landed. He draws in a desperate gasp of a breath. His eyes go wide and wild. I pull back. The gambit is over. I wait for him to right himself.

“Are you alright?” I say, my chest swollen with excitement, body vibrating with a new kind of pride.

“Yeah,” he huffs, scarcely audible. For a moment, his expression is stone. Then a smile surfaces. Our eyes meet. He is looking at me hard, as if taking something new in. His eyes no longer look pitted, but warm. Gentle, nearly. I wonder to myself if he is seeing me differently, but I already know the answer. That the thing he has waited for has finally arrived.

When we arrange ourselves in the ring again, the heaviness seems to lift, as though the gravity of the room has shifted. I no longer orbit James, and he no longer orbits me. He cracks his fingers from within his gloves, the blue scales of his arm glistening with sweat. I lick the jagged divot in my lip. Something higher, an ineffable force, pulls us off the ropes and towards the center of the square.

My shoulders loosen, as does my guard. Free of my usual intensity, a goofy smile blooms from over the rim of my mouthguard. We produce new punches, these ones fast and fluid, like lines of a memorized language. The two of us pulled into wordless conversation. A jab and a catch, a slip and a roll. I realize that I am having fun. James catches my eye and I know something has changed. The moment I have always been looking for is here, laid bare in front of me. My muscles hum with a good kind of burn. The tension in my hands ease, relaxing into the softness of my gloves.