It’s hard to figure out life sometimes. For Ken Davison, he was content, for perhaps the first time in a long time. Everything was going well with Kyra and her pregnancy. Chloe had stepped up to help with his school. His former rival Mr. Popular was officially under contract to serve as an instructor there as well. Something was missing and that seemed to be a conflict of some sort. There was something, always something, going on in the world of Ken Davison. For twenty seven years, it has been one thing after another. It was time to just enjoy life. He had proved everyone, most importantly himself, wrong by defending the UGWC Conquest Championship five times and earning a World Championship opportunity. Even with Cervantes Montague ahead of him, in a “Circus Deathmatch” of all things, he was calm, cool and collected.

As Chloe walks into the kitchen, he asks without even looking to see who entered the room, “What the hell is a Circus Deathmatch, anyway? Are they just going to shove popcorn and cotton candy down my throat and cause me to go into a diabetic coma?”

“Damned if I know. Dad never got involved in that stuff. He called it ‘garbage wrestling.’ Considering the kind of man he was, it was a bit shocking he was so much of a purist.”

Chloe walks over to the fridge, grabs the orange juice and pours herself a glass.

“You wanna borrow Lync?”

“No thanks, that’s your thing.”

Lync was a cast iron frying pan that had been gifted to Chloe in her younger days. Even after almost a decade, it was still stained with the blood of the now deceased Jace Valentine.

“So, you getting ready for this deathmatch of yours?”

“No, it just kind of randomly popped into my head. I was looking at stuff online about what mothers go through during pregnancy. I feel like everyone worries about the kid, you know. I get that. Totally understand that. But, I need to make sure I’m taking care of Kyra, too. Hold the mother, not the baby.⁣⁣ I know she’s losing sleep, I know the hormones can change things not just her body, but her mind. There’s times I catch her wincing, swelling, and we both know she’s been more emotional, although right now that doesn’t seem like a bad thing. I mean, my mother was a piece of human garbage, but I’ve talked to your Aunt Julia and I know mother’s put the baby first. I just want to make sure that Kyra knows that she’s just as important to me.”

“Well, I’ve never been a mother, so I’m probably the wrong person to talk to about this. But, I’ll tell you this much. I think you’re doing a great job over there, Mr. Clean. Kyra is happy. She and the baby are healthy. You take care of them. You even make sure that Adina doesn’t get forgotten. You even make sure her appointments aren’t on Mondays. The one time they switched her appointment to Tuesday morning, you hopped a red eye and had me pick you up at four in the morning. What more could you possibly do?”

Ken scrunches his nose and makes an odd kind of sneer. The facial expression is as awkward as the way he’s feeling.

“I just feel like I’m not doing enough.”

“You know what you can do? Stop sitting here acting like an idiot and go spend some time with your wife before he head to the airport.”

“Good idea,” Ken says and he places his palms on the table and pushes himself up. “Thanks.”

Ken walks out to find Kyra passed out on the couch in the living room. Her shirt has inched up a little bit, showing her baby bump. Ken smiles to himself and kneels in front of her, placing his hand on her belly.

“Goodnight, demonslayer, goodnight.”

He leans down and kisses her stomach, before reaching up and turning the light on the side table off. His knees crack as he stands up, but he ignores it and sits in his recliner, facing Kyra so he would be there when she wakes up.
⁣⁣


“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905


It had been about sixteen months since Ken Davison had set foot on these grounds. It had been a set of some kind. It was a building that had many uses over the years, but was now it was nothing more than a storehouse. Much like the night that he, Kyra, Johnny and Hide had filmed here, it was raining. There was no echo of his footsteps, the soft soles of his tennis shoes barely made a sound on the pavement underfoot. He reaches out to a familiar red door which fails to pop against the various shades of brick, made darker by that rain. The faux silver knob is no longer reflective and the black underneath comes through where wear and tear have worn away part of the outer covering. One thing had remained the same. The door closes behind Ken with the very same slow and gentle creek, followed by the sound of the inside door closing.

The pile of old, abandoned televisions are still in place. None of them seem to be plugged in, let alone powered on. Amongst the various stacks of old, abandoned furniture, the one clear path still remains in tact. Unsure of exactly why, Ken runs his hand over the plastic, faux wood looking top on one of the televisions as he walks past. He rubs his fingers together, knocking the clump of dust off of his fingers. Ken continues his way through, remembering the melancholy dirge played by the old Korean man. The man was named Cho Hyun-Ki. His first name translated to “The Foundation of Wisdom.” He was a great man, a man who truly lived up to his namesake. He was Ken’s Tae Kwon Do when he was coming back from breaking his back and had to change his in ring style, teaching Ken to fight smarter, not harder. “Foundation of Wisdom” indeed. He had unfortunately passed away last year after a battle with prostate cancer. Maybe that was why Ken had reached out to the television set as he passed by, he wanted to try and remember the connection to his Saseong one more time.

Ken opens the door at the end of the makeshift walkway, turning long enough to beckon the cameraman through the doorway. Contrary to his last visit, the scene is bleak. No lighting, no torches, no circus performers, only the evening sun setting on the horizon.Without all of the cacophony in the background, you can hear the rain on the tarp overhead, diverting the precipitation away.

“You might be wondering why, Cervantes, that I would return here knowing full well that when the last time I had filmed here, my team had lost. I am not afraid of the memory. Though I am a man of many fears, you are not one of them. This deathmatch is not one of them. This is an opportunity to visit violence, my old friend. I can do whatever comes to mind in my sadistic little mind and not have to worry about how I will be judged. I don’t know exactly what it is you are expecting. I don’t even know what you want out of this. The Coalition calls this a deathmatch. Back in Carnage, we simply called it another Wednesday night. You had to go bite off just a little bit more than you could chew. See the difference between you and me is I fought legends and I beat legends and I did it on my own. Your biggest mistake is listening to somebody else. You’ve got Tempest in your ear and now he’s got you all twisted. And ultimately Cerv, it’s gonna lead to your demise. Your biggest mistake comes at the hands of the GKD, “Godly” Ken Davison. I’m gonna cripple you, I’m gonna maim you. Not because you beat me, not because you tried to have your army of Astrocreeps take me out, and temporarily did. I’m still standing, I’m still here and I’m still ready to fight. Well, congratulations and welcome to the big time. You now have something in common with all the inmates on death row: you know when you’re gonna die. March 27th, when I wrap my hands around your throat and I watch the life escape from your eyes, the hell I send you to is gonna look like heaven compared to what I do to you here on earth.”

Ken takes some time to try and collect himself. He looks around at the remnants of the circus. He takes in the black iron cell, remembering the black haired woman seemingly trapped inside of it. She wriggled and writhed in a way that was reminiscent of Ken’s struggles after losing the Cooperative Championships. He was a prisoner only in his own mind, but trapped none the less. Ken walks towards the center of the ringmaster’s circle, trying as he might to keep his cool. His head stops as he looks to his left.

“ADINA!” he yells. Despite stopping dead in her track, still swinging to and fro due to the momentum that carried her. “I need you to have your mother take you to the car for a bit. I don’t want you hearing this.”

Adina waits for the swing to slow down, seemingly in shock at how terse Ken is being.

“Please, baby girl,” he pleads, softening his tone. As she scampers off, seemingly less offended, Ken returns his attention back to the camera.

“When I think about the last time we met in this environment, it makes me think of the utter devastation that was unleashed. It makes me think back specifically, to that first boot to the head from your partner providing the first instance of danger. I remember the warm trickle of blood the first moment the barbed wire pierced my skin. I felt so alive. It reminded me of the first “date” Kyra and I had. So bloody, so beautiful. Even better than that was the look on your face when your hair got caught in the barbed wire. To this day, watching you flail and panic like a mouse stuck on a glue board will be forever ingrained in my memory. Even your own partner, On-the-Rag Doll was laughing at you. For a moment, you were… “Almost Human,” Ken says while giving Cervantes a knowing wink.

“In order to prepare for you, I rewatched that match. They show all kinds of brutality. They show the depraved, despicable acts of degradation. But, you know what they don’t show? They don’t show the front row. They don’t show the parents sitting there with their small children. What I remember most about that night was those children crying their eyes out. I remember watching those parents consoling the children and wondering ‘Who the hell would bring their kid to see a death match?” But as those small kids sat in the front row and bawled their eyes out, while I was destroyed, while you were beaten down, while our partners bloodied each other with barbed wire and cheese graters and whiskey bottles, I knew that I wouldn’t allow the child that would become my daughter to cry like that. Not because of the violence. No, no, no, no! I didn’t want to come home and make my daughter cry because I lost.”

“A little bit of warning, parents, do NOT, I repeat do NOT bring your children to Gnaw Bone.If you bought tickets for the entire family, get yourself a refund. Scalp those tickets. Hire a babysitter and bring a friend. As a matter of fact, do NOT let your children sit in front of the TV and watch Nightmare and Gnaw Bone, because what the Baltimore Elite did to you last year will be NOTHING compared to what I do to you Monday. Cervantes, I will take it to a level that even YOU have never seen before – that even YOU have never been to before. I will beat you worse than you have ever been beaten in your life. I will bloody you worse than you have ever been beaten in your life. I know that as I beat you, I will love every second of it. Every drop of blood that drops from your head, I will REVEL in it. I will show the Showman the meaning of ‘entertainment’ in the proverbial Roman Colosseum.”

Ken picks up a knife from the ground, looking somewhat surprised to find one laying about after the previous cleanup. He whips it as the wheel, picturing the woman in skin tight leather that had been strapped to it. The good news is had she been fastened to the wheel, she wouldn’t have died. The bad news would have been that she would probably have been concussed from the butt of the hilt that would have struck her in the forehead.

“The more I think about it, the more I realize how right I am. My daughter is six years old. I’m not worried about her seeing what happens to me. What deeply disturbs me is the thought of them seeing what I will do TO YOU. You see, I don’t want her little innocent eyes to realize how violent her dad can be! I don’t want her innocent little eyes to look at the bloodshed which will surely take place! And above all else, I don’t want them to look into her father’s eyes and realize, as the blood drips down your face, that deep down inside, their dear, sweet dad, that man who lets her paint his nails and dress up as a Disney princess, will be LOVING IT! Now you are going to make threats about what happened last time, and you’ll surely say it’s even worse, and I have every reason to believe that you mean every word, because you certainly do.In this game. you are one the best in this business right now.”

“But certainly you don’t think that I’m gonna show up Snow Bone without just a few surprises! You don’t think that I don’t have an entire collection of toys that I could bring with me? And I’m not talking about a garbage can. I’m not talking about a ladder and I’m not talking about a chair. I’m talking about some old friends.”

Someone on the other side of the camera slides a military style duffle bag on the ground, which Ken stops in front of him with his foot. He reaches down and pulls out a red aluminum baseball bat that has obviously seen better days. The black grip tape on the bottom is weathered, worn and ripped, showing the reflection of the fire engine red handle coming through. The top is a somewhat different shade of red, having lost its reflective qualities a long time ago. The cold gray steel comes through at the top of the barrel and with the numerous dings and places where there seem to be actual gouges in the metal, you can tell that this bat has never seen a baseball in its life. The most telling sign of it’s previous usage is the large, approximately human skull sized dent right over the sweet spot. Ken kisses the dent before turning his attention back to the camera.

“Right here we’ve got the Big Red Monster. This baby here has been with me going back to 1996. I know there a wrestler out there who stole that name, but by the time he started using it, I’d already retired my baby. Let’s see, what else do we have here?”

Ken pulls out what looks like a right handed metal glove. At the finger tips, the gloves each have small metal points. Ken puts the glove on and opens and closes his fist to get a good feel for it once again.

“If that’s not enough, I’ve discovered that I enjoy the feeling of sharp, metallic objects that will be brought down upon your ass with great vengeance! With this, the Hands of God becomes an even greater weapon. I love seeing the sheer agony, the shock and awe in my opponents eyes when they realize that I’m not just squeezing their temples, but actually puncturing a hole into their very being. And then, when I see the blood flowing freely down your face, when I look into your eyes and see if you are the man I believe you to be or not, I will either force your body into submission and compress your cranium until your body cannot take it anymore or I will subjugate your psyche into submission and force you to tap out. One way or another, that is how it will end. How it HAS to end.”

Ken walks up to the stage, placing his hands in the loops of the ropes dangling from the ceiling where the human marionette’s had danced during the “Midnight Circus.” The ropes tighten, holding Ken’s arms out as a spotlight comes on. There are some beams in between the illumination and where Ken is standing because the silhouette gives the illusion that Ken is actually being crucified.

“Forgive me, Father, for I know exactly what I do.”