How to Talk to a Widower

of my house!” I grunt at him. Then the molded elbow of drainpipe he’s holding snaps like a wishbone and we both fly backward off the wall in a clean arc. Jim lands hard on top of me, sandwiching me between him and the ground like luncheon meat, and I can actually feel my lungs implode as every last bit of air is wrung from them. Before I can even roll over, Jim pulls me to my feet and throws me back down again. “You son of a bitch!” he bellows, and all I can see are his bare feet on the grass, heading toward me, and then I’m flying through the air again, and then back on the ground with my face in the grass, tasting dirt, and if only the yard would stop spinning like an amusement park ride, if only my mouth would remember how to suck the air down to my lungs, I could defend myself. I did, after all, study karate as a teenager with Sensei Goldberg at the Y. Upper block, reverse punch, side kick to the knee, knife hand strike to the neck. I can bring the pain. But the world keeps spinning and all I see are detached, fragmentary images at skewed angles that won’t stand still, the house, the sky, Angie running forward with a panicked look on her face, Jim bleeding from his nose (did I do that?), advancing on me again. And somewhere above me I can hear Claire’s screaming voice,
Get the hell off of him, you bastard!
And I stagger to my feet just in time for Jim to grab me by my neck and throw me up against the wall of the house, and I hadn’t realized that we were so close to the house, maybe we weren’t, maybe he carried me there by my neck, and over his shoulder I can see Angie’s face, can see her mouth moving, and this shouldn’t be happening to me, because I’m the good guy, I’m the widower, I’m not supposed to get the shit kicked out of me in my own front yard in full view of the neighbors, and my legs momentarily go out from under me, and I teeter to the side, which causes Jim’s first punch to miss me, his massive fist whistling hotly against the skin of my nose without meaningful impact. And I can see the windup of the next shot like it’s happening in slow motion, can see the punch being born, can plot the arc of its trajectory, and this is the hand on which he wears his obnoxiously large college ring, big enough to kneel and kiss, like he’s the pope of Rockland Community College, and yet my hands are not coming up to block, my head is not ducking, and I understand the punch is coming, solid and pure of purpose, that it will be a mother of a punch, with Jim’s full weight behind it, a face-altering, bone-crushing punch, and still my hands hang limply by my side. And then, from the periphery, a dark shape, airborne, and then I’m on the ground again, and so is Jim, and so is Russ, who has jumped from the porch to tackle us, and now his fists are flying furiously, pummeling Jim, who rolls on the ground, arms wrapped around his head, and they are King Kong and Godzilla and I’m the blond chick stuck in the middle, and when I try to pull Russ off, his swinging fist hits me square on the side of my face, an inch under my eye, and dark spots appear across my field of vision and I sit down hard. Russ jumps off of Jim, and runs over to me, cursing and apologizing, and Angie jumps onto Jim, and everyone’s been hit, everyone’s down, and somehow the fight is over as quickly as it began, like a broken spell, and I’m just trying to breathe, and I can feel the welt like a hot slug forming under my skin where Russ’s fist connected, can taste the warm blood in my mouth, and Russ is crying, and Angie is crying, and Jim is shaking, and there are sirens in the distance, and I’m just trying to breathe, and the yard is slowing down, and if I could just breathe I could start to sort this out, if I could just get my mouth to open and my lungs to inflate, if I could just get some oxygen into my blood, I could begin to sort this out, and the sirens grow louder, and Claire is in the yard now, Claire is down on her knees in my face, Claire is saying something, but I can’t hear her over the sound of blood rushing in my ears like a waterfall, and then I’m lying on my side again, seeing past Claire’s knees, past Russ’s legs, past the tangled forms of Jim and Angie, over to the other side of the yard, and there’s a brown rabbit there, sitting in the shadow of the arborvitaes that line the property, and he’s looking right at me, this rabbit, staring at me, thinking shit about me, silently