It's a parallel universe and everyone expresses themselves through martial arts
by LUKE TARASSENKO
It's a parallel universe and everyone expresses themselves through martial arts.
The elderly Chinese ladies down the street are in the park every morning doing their t'ai chi, arms flowing in liquid movement, fanned fingers caressing the air as they twist their palms through the predefined motions.
It wouldn't be a problem except for the fact that they play amplified music while they do it which has woken you up three times now. They look like they should be easy to defeat but you've challenged them three times, right there in the park, and a different one of them has kicked your ass each time. They've been doing it for years.
Another teacher you sort of know from school practices capoeira, the Brazilian art where you spend most of your time upside down. Maybe that could work for you. You pluck up the courage to ask if you can come along to a class, where you gawk as the regulars and your teacher "friend" backflip, handstand, and cartwheel-kick to the bouncing rhythms of conga drums. It's another choreographed dance to which you do not know the steps.
It's not for you. You don't have the stomach (or the upper body strength) for it. Your own martial art is an odd blend of some moves you copied from the children's cartoon Dragon Ball Z, a few lessons of Bruce Lee-style wing chun which you once won in a charity auction, and your family's cossack fighting style which you inherited from them along with your pot belly, wonky knee-caps and hatred of small talk.
Now you're a bit older and you're in a mother and toddler group because you've decided to go down to fighting the kids at school part-time. You're the only father. Your two-year-old is in the middle of the ring, twirling to the music in demonstration of an early form of her own cossack style crossed with English bare-knuckle boxing. (When a heterosexual couple fights together without contraception the combat is brutal and nine months later the woman gives birth. The child's martial art style is a blend of their parents'.)
Into the circle steps another little girl with beautiful taut eyelids. This child practices a version of Praying Mantis-style Shaolin kung fu crossed with Chinese drunken boxing. Her hands bend downward at the wrists, fingertips pressed together into pretend tibia; her limbs lash out at random intervals as she drifts towards your daughter. You wince, but etiquette dictates that you can't intervene unless one of them does something that really hurts the other.
They settle naturally into their dance and though their movements are non-deliberate, unpolished, un-artful, they are more at ease in their own bodies than us adults. For a moment they gyrate in mutual orbit, managing to avoid each other's punches, kicks and sweeps by sheer chance.
Then disaster strikes. Someone has thrown a teddy bear into the ring and your daughter picks it up. The other girl sights it, toddles over, and snatches it, which is against The Rules. Your daughter looks at you right away, eyes wide, her expression at first frozen in shock as if to say "That's not supposed to happen," and then her bottom lip starts to tremble.
Your heart rends.
