My House of Pain: The Blade That Cuts

The first time I saw Karen fight, my goddamn heart stopped. Sweat gleamed on her shoulders like fresh blood under those cheap fluorescent lights, her knuckles split open and raw. She moved like water and hit like a fucking freight train—no hesitation, no mercy. I wasn't just watching her—I was being consumed by her, every cell in my body screaming recognition of something primal I'd been searching for.

My first true love wasn't tender. She was a hurricane wrapped in human skin, and I wanted to drown in her storm. After her matches, we'd sit in my beaten-up old challenger, the metallic tang of blood still fresh on her lips when we kissed. The taste of her victory mixing with cheap whiskey burned a hole straight through to my soul. Her calloused fingers would trace the scars on my ribs—each one a story of past defeats she somehow made beautiful.

I recognized those movements immediately—the same vicious grace her father had hammered into my muscles. Steve, that aging cruel monster, had been my sensei since I was green as spring grass. He'd break you down to nothing, then rebuild you into something feral. Watching him demonstrate pa flying knee at fifty-something, his weathered face twisted into a snarl of joy—it was like seeing violence perfected, distilled into its purest form. I wanted that power like a starving man wants bread. Needed it in my bones.

Her brother Michael and I were already thick as thieves by then. College fight circuit bros, K-1 style, breaking bodies for beer money and the sick rush that comes when you connect a perfect hook. The sound—that wet smack of flesh giving way—it gets in your blood. Steve would watch from the corner sometimes, arms crossed over his chest like ancient tree roots, nodding silently when one of us landed something particularly brutal. His approval felt better than winning. Better than breathing.

But nothing compared to the nights after fights when Karen and I would collapse , bodies bruised and buzzing with adrenaline. We'd sleep like we fought—all raw power and desperate need, the smell of sweat and copper hanging in the air between us. Love and violence, so goddamn tangled up I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.

We had a whole crew back then. A chosen family forged in violence and sweat-soaked loyalty.

Michael taught me to bury my feelings so deep they'd never crawl back out. "Feelings get you killed," he'd spit through his mouth-guard, blood bubbling between his teeth. "Save that shit for when you’re dead." His eyes were always cold—glacier blue and just as merciless—even when he smiled.

John the criminal justice major was our moral fucking compass, always extending a hand to a fallen opponent, always talking about "respect" and "honor" like we weren't just animals tearing at each other for sport. His knuckles were permanently swollen, but he'd still shake hands before every fight like we were gentlemen and not savages. I was never that noble.

DJ buried himself in books when he wasn't burying his fists in someone's gut. Quiet fucker with glasses and a right hook that could drop a charging bull. He'd quote Nietzsche while wrapping his hands, philosophical bullshit about the abyss staring back, his voice soft in the locker room chaos.

Then there was Bubba, all 400 pounds of him, black as midnight and twice as mysterious. He was a bouncer at the club where he and I worked, a local gentlemen's strip club. He'd watch from the corner, massive arms crossed, teaching me shit about his neighborhood I had no business knowing. White boy, he'd rumble, voice like gravel, you better listen good 'cause I ain't repeating this shit. His laugh felt like an earthquake. He'd school me on everything from street slang to the unwritten rules of surviving in the projects, where cops never came unless they were looking to add another body to their count.

One night after Bubba and I broke up a fight, blood still sticky on our knuckles, he played me rap tracks from artists the radio stations were too scared to touch—NWA, Public Enemy—street journalism that made my sheltered upbringing feel like a Disney movie. The lyrics hit like brass knuckles to the temple, stories of hustle and survival I'd only seen in movies. This ain't just music, he'd say, passing me a bottle of something that burned all the way down, this is fucking survival language. I'd nod like I understood, but we both knew I was just a tourist in his reality.

Remy brought the bayou with him everywhere. Cajun swamp boy with moss-green eyes and scars mapping his arms like rivers. He would tell stories about his mom and her ways that might've been bullshit but made us lean in close anyway. Well except that time she threatened to kill me for asking what was in her gumbo. His accent got thicker when he drank, words melting together like butter on a hot pan.

Rene, a lesbian tough enough to hang with our blood-drunk brotherhood, kept me honest. "You're so fucking gay it hurts to watch," she'd snort, throwing back shots. "Just admit it already." Each time those words left her mouth, something in my chest would twist like a knife being turned. She saw right through the hyper-masculine bullshit I wrapped around myself like armor. Her eyes—sharp as broken bottle glass—would lock onto mine until I had to look away, afraid she'd see the truth I was drowning in whiskey and violence.

Her sister Saraya would flex nearby, muscles rippling under brown skin, silent judgment in her eyes. The two of them existed in their truth while I suffocated in my lies, and they fucking knew it. Sometimes Rene would catch me staring at her sister's tattoos, not the muscles underneath them, and smirk like she had me all figured out.

And ruling over all of us was Steve—the Muay Thai master, Karen’s and Michael's father. He moved like he was twenty years younger than he was, each kick precise enough to split atoms. We were in awe of him, hungry for his approval like starving dogs. We didn't know then what was happening behind closed doors. Didn't want to see the darkness behind his warrior's discipline.

But Karen.…….Karen was something else entirely. We didn't just beat the shit out of each other—we understood each other in that violence. We wrapped our loneliness in bloody gauze and pretended the pain was just from fighting. We blew tournament winnings on cheap whiskey and cheaper thrills, bruises blooming across our skin like twisted love notes.

I'd try to talk to her about her scars in the dark, memorizing each raised line, each story of pain she'd survived. Mine were the same. Felt the same. She'd let me, sometimes, before shoving me away, walls slamming back into place. "Don't get soft on me," she'd growl, but her eyes would be wet in the moonlight streaming through dirty windows.

We would go to estate sales to collect our shit like addicts hunting for a fix. A claymore here. A french rapier there. Weekends spent crawling through dead people's houses, fingers twitching with anticipation when we'd spot a blade hanging on some study wall or hidden in a basement gun cabinet. We'd elbow each other, eyes locked on our prey, speaking in our own language of nods and whispers. Going to estate sales, so we could get the bladed weapons we wanted, because we were obsessed. Obsessed like people who've found religion or hard drugs—that same hungry gleam in our eyes when steel caught the light.

The Muramasa blade had been buried in storage containers for months. Just some ancient metal I'd picked up because I wanted the Spanish cutlasses in the same estate sale lot. I had a blacksmith friend of Michael's reshape the handle, clean it up. It looked cool. I was just a stupid fucking kid playing with history I didn't understand. Ancient steel that gleamed with an oily sheen no matter how you wiped it down, like it was sweating its own darkness.

The old Japanese man running the sale had watched me with eyes like burnt holes in paper when I handed over the cash, his mouth a tight line as if holding back words of warning. History would have warned me if I had read enough about it, something about souls and bloodlust, but I didn't. Because I was just a stupid kid with delusions of being a warrior, collecting sharp things to make myself feel dangerous when inside I was nothing but soft confusion and terror.

And that’s how it was for a while, until it wasn’t like that anymore. Then it got much worse.

When Karen went silent, I should've known. Depression hung on her like a second skin most days, but this was different. This was absence. Her eyes—usually sharp enough to cut—went dull, focused on something none of us could see.

The key turned in the lock with a sound like bones breaking. Michael and I stood there, and the smell hit us both—copper-thick and primal, the stench that triggers something ancient in your brain stem. Fight or flight. Danger. Death. The house was silent except for the tick-tick-tick of the kitchen clock. My hand trembled on the doorknob, knuckles white as bone, as I pushed the door wider. It was dark, curtains drawn against the day, and something viscous gleamed black in the thin strips of light cutting through the gloom.

She'd done it right. Researched it. Ritual fucking hara-kiri, the muramasa pushed in below the ribs then drawn across. Slow. Agonizing. Deliberate as hell. The carpet around her was soaked black, her face frozen in a grimace that wasn't quite peace, wasn't quite pain, but something worse—resolution. Her skin was waxy-pale, tinged blue at the fingertips that still clutched the blade's handle. I could taste bile rising in my throat, burning and acrid, as my knees gave out and I collapsed against the door-frame, the wood grain digging into my palm like tiny teeth.

The note on the floor was three words: "He won't stop."

Michael and I stood there in dismay. My legs gave out beneath me, and I crashed to my knees on the floor, the impact shooting pain up through my spine that I barely felt. The blade—my blade—glinted in the half-light like an accusation. This was my fault. My fucking fault. She wouldn't have needed to die if you'd been honest with yourself first, Wendy whispered from somewhere deep inside me. If you'd shown her there was another way out. I shoved it down, buried it under guilt and rage where it belonged.

If I hadn't brought that cursed thing into her life, if I hadn't been so caught up in my own bullshit to see what was happening to her, maybe she'd still be breathing. I carried that weight for years afterward, a stone lodged behind my ribs that grew heavier with each passing day, grinding my insides to dust.

Three days later, I watched them lower her into frozen ground, rain coming down in icy sheets that stung like needles against my face. Just six people huddled under black umbrellas—her father stoic and silent, her brother stone faced and unwavering, an aunt nobody had seen in years, and us. No friends. No coworkers. Just empty cemetery plots stretching out around us like a sea of forgotten promises.

The priest rushed through his words, eager to get back into his car, his voice drowned by the drumming of raindrops on canvas. The casket gleamed wetly in the gray light as it descended with mechanical indifference. I felt empty, hollowed out, my guts scraped clean with something dull and rusty, as mud splashed onto my shoes and the first shovelful of soggy earth hit the lid with a sound like the world ending.

Michael wrapped his car around a tree two weeks later, drunk off his ass and doing 90 on a back road. He wanted it. He wanted out. My brother in arms, my best friend took the easy way out. The funeral was closed casket.

His casket gleamed obscenely in the gray light, polished wood hiding the mangled reality of what remained. I could taste copper in my mouth from biting my cheek so hard, trying not to fucking scream at him, at the universe that took him and left me standing there with mud seeping into my cheap dress shoes. Grief sat in my chest like a block of concrete.

Then came the accusations. The trial. Their father in handcuffs, stone-faced as evidence after evidence revealed his abuses to his children. Physical. Mental. Monstrous. The man we'd worshiped was a fucking demon wearing human skin. His eyes—cold as winter pond water—never flinched as photographs of bruises bloomed across courtroom screens. And still, there were those who defended him, who spat venom at his accusers, their blind loyalty like a disease eating through truth and decency. Every damning word that echoed through that wood-paneled room scraped away another layer of illusion until nothing remained but the raw, bleeding truth of what he was.

Everything unraveled after that. Bubba's heart gave out under all that weight he carried—years of greasy burgers and protein shakes finally collecting their due like a loan shark with brass knuckles. His massive frame collapsed one night, the mattress sagging with a final groan beneath him. John disappeared into some police department somewhere, probably still shaking hands before he arrests people, flashing that pageant smile while snapping cuffs that bite into their wrists. His badge gleams in the interrogation room light, but his eyes stay hollow.

Rene and Saraya stayed in the circuit, each sister chasing her own addiction. Rene collected confused straight women like trophies, luring them in with that predatory smile and keeping score of how many "just experimenting" girls never made it back to boyfriends after her bed. "It's not my fault they don't know what they want until I show them," she'd laugh, fingers tracing patterns on some random girl's thigh at the bar while we pretended not to notice how good she was at it. Meanwhile, Saraya injected, supplemented, and lifted her way to a body that screamed power—muscles stacked on muscles until her skin stretched thin as cigarette paper, veins writhing like worms beneath the surface. Both hooked on their own kind of conquest—Rene's bedroom tallies and Saraya's weight room records—chasing validation in places that would never fill what was missing.

Remy channeled that swamp-born intensity into chemical engineering, hunched over beakers that bubble and hiss like the bayou at dusk. His scarred hands, once callused from barbells, now mix compounds with surgical precision, creating flavor enhancers that fool the tongue into tasting what isn't there. The same goddamn determination that pushed him through gut-wrenching workouts now keeps him awake for days, eyes bloodshot and burning, chasing formulas that will make processed shit taste like mama's Sunday gravy.

We haven't spoken in years. Some bonds aren't meant to last. Some are forged in such darkness they can't survive the light.

But sometimes, when I think back, I swear I can hear Karen laughing—that rare, genuine sound that cracked through her armor like lightning splitting oak.

I can feel the sigh of her voice in my ear in those few quiet moments she'd allow herself to rest, her breath hot and ragged against my neck. She knew you better than you knew yourself, Wendy murmurs in the darkness. She saw through the mask you wore.