by Tom Leins

I point my shrivelled dick at the dogweed and it sputters like a badly inserted drip. I tuck it back inside my leotard and carry on down the dirt track towards Burrachaga’s clapboard shack. The Old Testament landscape has been brutalised by the winter wind and snow, and the wintry remnants seep through the cheap soles of my wrestling boots.

***

Ever since he snapped a 17-year-old’s neck at a house show Fingerfuck Flanagan has considered Burrachaga too toxic to put on a card. He wore a Mexican wrestling mask for a couple of bouts, but his tattoos gave him away, and the crowd threw cups of beer, piss and sometimes blood over him. He ended up down in Crooked Timber, fighting against Bobbie-Sue Barraclough, when he tore every knee ligament, apart from his anterior cruciate. The promoter dumped him in the parking lot, howling in pain.

***

Burrachaga’s legs are now withered with disuse, and he spends his days sat in an old lawn chair, injecting Metandienone and lifting his rusted dumbbells. His arms are corded with muscle — they are bigger than my fucking legs — but his legs are spindly and emaciated.

“Burrachaga.”

His fists tense on the arms of his chair. The scars of ambition glow white on his knuckles.

“Blood Bubble.”

Some names Fingerfuck thought up on the spot, others he chewed over for weeks. Mine he came up with one afternoon, watching us train. I coughed up a blood bubble every time someone hit me with a gut-wrench suplex.

Fingerfuck trailed a tasselled loafer through the thick smear of blood on the canvas.

“Boy, I’m gonna call you Blood Bubble.”

Man, he was happier than a dog with two dicks that day. He even treated me and a couple of the other new guys to supper in Arby’s, although we had to pay for our own milkshakes.

***

“Nice place you got here.”

He shrugs.

“Not too many wrestlers die rich in this town …”

Burrachaga is a good looking man — until he opens his mouth. When he smiles it looks like a cow’s asshole. Even from this distance his breath smells like crotch-rot. A disfigured hooker named Angel lets him go down on her on Friday nights. She told me he was here.

“I haven’t seen you since your jaw was wired back together.”

It was one year ago exactly. We were fighting against a couple of carnies called the Chainsaw Brothers.

He refused to tag into the match because he was hungover, and I got beaten like a red-headed step-child.

“Can you still fight?”

“I can still fight you.”

He lunges out of his seat, and his left leg cracks before he is even halfway across the room. He screams as he hits the deck.

I drag him away from his chair, and stomp his jaw through the rotten floorboards.

Alive or dead, the rats will eat his legs before sun-up. Those little fuckers love the taste of bad meat.

Then they will start on his face.

---

Tom Leins is a disgraced ex-film critic from Paignton, UK. His short stories have been published by the likes of Akashic Books, Shotgun Honey, Near to the Knuckle, Revolution John and Spelk. He is currently working on his first novel: Thirsty & Miserable. Get your pound of flesh at https://thingstodoindevonwhenyouredead.wordpress.com/.