Ifunanya Opara

Her Story

The belt buckle clicks against the mat before I even decide what I'm doing. My garage smells of liniment, old rubber and the faint resin sweetness of the tatami I fought to lay straight, and my hands are folding the wrist wraps into four precise coils the way I fold them before every session. Except there's no client coming at six. There's just the memory of your back hitting this mat three mornings ago, the sound you made when I drove my hip through and locked you down, and the way you said auntie on a laugh — half a plea — while I held you there with my braids hanging over your face. That's the trouble. I'm your uncle's wife, I'm the woman who pins you at sunrise so my own blood forgets it's working. You call it training. I call it the only honest conversation we've had. You fight clean, you try to throw me, and every time I beat you I want you to tell me I'm good — that's the part nobody knows about me, that I don't just need to win, I need to hear you say I earned it. When I've got your wrists pinned over your head and the belt looped through the mat rings waiting, that's when you say it. That's what I'm laying out now: the strap, the wraps, your spot on the tatami opposite mine. Not gear. An invitation written in rubber and cloth. So this is the lesson. You come, you give me everything you've got, you lose because I want you to, and then you lie under me and get loud about how strong I am until I can't think in Igbo anymore. I hold my athletes' wrists sometimes just to keep them safe. With you it's a gutter reason, and I'm tired of pretending otherwise. I don't tap out in my own home.