Two Weeks Ago
A forlorn Melissa Aki, in shorts and a long Shinedown T-shirt sits on the roof of the pool house at her house in California. She sees the ripples of the water, sees her wife lounging on a lounger which was named that for this precise use. Looking down at her wife, unaware of the Assassin Maki on the roof but she was not contemplating assassinating her but in actuality what it would feel like to dive off this building, the short term pain as her head connected to concrete and stone, the last millisecond of life in her as neck snapped like a twig on a branch. Would it be glorious? Would it end her own suffering? Would it rid of a demon that doesn’t even want to help her win matches? She failed. Again. She knew she had one hell of a war with Alicia and every time they faced, she respected her even more and it could of gone either way at the end but it was another defeat. Yes, she had her best performance in months, a new vital, aggressive part of her soul came out to play and she enjoyed it. She enjoyed the bloodshed and the pain but what if she had just dreamt up those past glories?
Could it be true that she was remembering events from someone else’s life and she just dressed them up as hers? She wasn’t the woman she had been two years ago. She wasn’t the best signing SCW ever made like she knew she was when she signed on with this company. She was signed on reputation and what she had achieved but it was all a debased lie. She was nothing without Daniela’s help and that retched demon only helps when it enables her to get a reward. She should have known not to trust a demon. Hardly trustworthy individuals were they. She was a shell of a human. She was nothing. A nobody. A loser. Hell, Kate Warren was more of a winner and she was the biggest loser she had ever met. She was a contender once and now she was a bum on the street, sitting in the proverbial gutter, or in this case the roof, wondering where her career had gone. Being usurped by momentous ignoramuses like Myra.
She wondered to herself if suicide was ever the answer. Why had she suddenly thought about ending it all right her because she was on a losing streak? As her mind raced, she saw something in her mind’s eye, it was small but was getting bigger, she could see it was a newspaper clipping, showing The Argus newspaper from her hometown in England. It read: Local Brightonian, Melissa Aki, 27 years old, who had spent the last eight years of her life wrestling in the U.S, gaining prominence throughout the sports entertainment industry, sadly took her life last night. She had a losing streak and could not dare to fail herself, her family or the industry she loved. She is survived by Yukiko, her wife, her Mother and Father, sister Hannah and brother Sam. She always had mental health issues and for as long as anyone can remember she claimed to be possessed by a Demon. RIP Maki. We were all blessed you were a part of our lives.
Then it disappeared. She almost slipped off the roof as her head span around this weird newspaper article. She regained her composure as she sat there on the roof, looking down at her wife, the stone patio, the swimming pool, she remembered watching a rerun of World of Sport: Wrestling. Her dad avidly watching Dynamite Kid and Davey Boy, Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy. Those were the fondest memories of her life with her dad, she grew up with wrestling. Living, breathing, eating it. She had gone after her dreams, even though her Dad warned her, she still left and toiled, scraped and clawed her way to the top of the summit only to come crashing down again but then a memory invaded her contemplation:
Her Dad, Michael was sitting on a bench in the local gym as Melissa was kickboxing and growing frustrated at her kicks failing to hit the mark. She started to punch, kick, head butt the kick bag. Michael grabbed her and sat her down next to him. She was still stamping her feet in annoyance at her own failure. Michael looked straight ahead at the kickbag, another student was mistiming his strikes as well as father and daughter sat in silence. Then Michael sighed and Melissa still hung her head, kicking the floor still but with less gusto, “You may think you know who your enemy is. Someone who has slighted you, called you names, bullied you, stole your boyfriend, annoyed you because maybe they are of significantly inferior intelligence, maybe they don’t believe you about these ghosts and ghouls that you say surround you. It doesn’t matter why. You will feel like they are your greatest foe and an obsession will take over you, bind you to that person, to take that person and kill them, kill their hopes of hurting and torturing you but, Melly, that person or even persons mean nothing to you in the long run and they will never be your greatest nemesis.”
She groaned and let her hair cover her face, annoyed at herself and now getting vexed with her father. Why couldn’t they just go home? The memory was so vivid in this moment. She could feel her own anxiety and with age she could feel her dad’s love and despair for any pain she was going through.
He patted her knee, lifted her head and kissed his daughter on the forehead. [color=yellow} “I know your mother dotes on Han but you are the world to me, Melly. You need to realise that the demon inside you is not a real, flesh gorging, fallen angel. It is your own need to control, your own narcissism, your fear of failure that haunts you. I want you, darlin’, to be free of that. To be happy and healthy and your own person but honey…love…you will only ever be free if you do not fear failure but embrace it and use it to learn and to evolve. To become better than you once were. That is what failure is all about. I fail every day. I failed in keeping you safe when that gang of girls attacked you but..no…no…Melly it’s true but it brought us here to teach you to survive when I am gone. We took on board what happened and decided to never let it happen again. You will win a lot and lose a lot in life. That is just the game we all play. I have one more thing to tell you.
I do not want you to ever settle for the small fry. I want you to go for gold, honey. Reach for that star, pull it down and hold it close. One day you will need to decide whether you own the swimming pool or dive into the Ocean. The pool is nice, you feel relaxed, you own it, you are the one that is the champion of your surroundings, yet, the Sea, it holds life in its hands. You can easily drown, be killed by a myriad of creatures, stones, sand enveloping you but would you rather be free in the ocean fighting against the world’s best and biggest predators or in the safe confines of your own swimming pool? Think about. Okay let’s go. I will buy you a bag of chips on the way home from the chippy. Hopefully that will cheer you up.” [/color]
She shook her head free of the memory, sat and thought about calling her Dad, she missed him so much, and with the pandemic she couldn’t even go and visit him. As always, he had been right. He knew that she had a fear of failure and it would overcome her at some point in her life and his words, subconsciously made her choose to sign with SCW because it was a sea of sharks but it was better to fight amongst the sharks than be the champion of a bunch of pond life. It was not worth killing herself over, but her career was worth fighting for.
A trip to the Gobi Desert.
Transcendental meditation is so odd, Melissa thought, as she found herself in the lotus position, chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo whilst twirling her Buddhist beads around her fingers; her bare legs were being scalded by the hot sand of the Gobi Desert. How the blazes had she travelled to the Gobi Desert in southern Mongolia? She had travelled to distant places, the greater universe, different astral planes during her deep meditations but this was real human life. She could feel the sand between her toes, heating her up. She could see in the distance a Ger, round and the material flapping in the slight breeze, Yaks and camels were slowly being walked by a man and a boy in the traditional deel clothing. How was this real? Had she somehow traversed the space and time continuum?
She got up and tip toed around the hot sand, looking towards the Ger, a figure started to rise from the sand in front of her, twisting and twirling into a shape of a sandman. Melissa had seen various oddities in her life, from demonic entities, ghosts, aliens and now some weird sand figure didn’t bother her in the slightest. She made sure her hair was tightly drawn in a ponytail, grabbed some afghan scarf that was nearby for some reason and used it to cover her mouth from the sand flying off this creature.
She stood still and watched the features on its face become clearer. “So, like, you’re some imaginary creature my subconscious brought forth to scare me?” She wasn’t sure what this whole situation was about.
The creature just stared at her then it spoke in such deep baritone she thought her eardrums were exploding, “Yes, I could well be from your subconscious mind, but I am here for an important reason, Melissa Aki. You see, you have been demotivated, telephoning it in as you people like to call it, not even a slump could cover what you have been through. A rut you could call it. Why? Why had one of the best in the world, one of the toughest warriors lost her way? Only you can answer this.”
She looked as the sand swirled around the figure in front of her, she felt the sting of its words – her words. She had slumped to a ridiculous low in recent weeks. Failing so hard she didn’t think she would get up again and then she fought Alicia Lukas and gave her all. Suddenly, when she came around after the war they had, she knew she had not given her all in previous battles. She had always needed someone to bounce off, some nemesis to take out at all costs, some evil entity to fight. She realised she had just gone from match to match without any feeling either way for her opponents except Lukas, due to their friendship and long-standing rivalry. She needed someone to take out.
Someone to abuse and bleed and for their pain to mean something. She had a huge hit list of people she despised in Sin City. She would need to choose one and take her off the face of the earth.
She smiled under her Afgan as the swirling sand hit her spectacles which was annoying. “Yes, mysterious sand person, you are right. I let myself down so much, since Salco, since the ankle injury, I haven’t been me, I haven’t been the psychotic, psychological assassin I have always been. It is time for me to show why I am the greatest signing in Sin City history!”
She woke up on her couch, laying flat down, with a Lion-O blanket over her. She sat up and looked around, had this been the past? Who was that person in her meditation, when was it? How come she had been somewhere else completely and then deposited on to her sofa at home? The words had come from the past. Yet, here she was just a few days removed from her heinous attack on Crystal (She would never call her Christina), she thought she would feel something. Something akin to excitement, yet, it was Hilton after all, who could give a damn about beating her senseless? All she had done was do what the entire roster wanted to do – Decimate the former champion who now wants to prove to the world that she is the good girl in all of this? Oh she is a real card that one.
Yet, the vision, it told her what she knew was inside her, what she had done to Crystal, the formation of a plan was coming to her. She knew she had to make Crystal pay, she had to create a nemesis in her, she had to hurt her so badly that the little disgraceful, blue haired simpleton, would need to extract her revenge and she welcomed it. Oh, how wonderful that would be because it had become glaringly obvious this is what she thrived on, the battle, the feud, the chase.
She felt the stirring of Daniela, but she could hold her back for now; she could even blame the whole thing on her but nah it wasn’t vicious enough. Daniela will be used in this affair before the dust settles but for now let her growl. She had Bobbie Dahl to eviscerate.
Why?
” There are a lot of things that happen in life, they can be bad or good, conforming to societal rules or abandoning them. You can sit in the rut of your life, whether of your making or not, accept your fate or you can stare it right in the face and fight back. Like, the old lady in the corner shop, buying her newspaper or a Wispa bar, surrounded by ignorant chavs, they want to make fun of her just for wanting a chocolate bar as she reads the newspaper, does she let them mock her, tease her or even push her over? They have no respect for her past or who she was, but she is a little old lady who can be bullied and abuses. So, she does what any self-respecting former assassin would do and beats the living hell out of them with her walking stick. The cashier looks at her as she puts the coin down for her items and mouths the word ‘why,’ yet she smiles and slowly makes her way out of the shop, stepping over the hoodlums. The moral to this story is never accept the fate that you have been given and never trust someone because of the way they look or act. The second part of the moral is that there isn’t always a need to know why things happen the way they do.”
The words of Melissa Aki aka Maki, whilst dangling over the edge of a roof of a hospital (or local medical facility) as ambulances come and go. She smiles to herself. She has no makeup on and her hair is tied into bunches. We only see her face. “Is it part of the human condition to always need to know why things happen? Hell, I want to know the killer is caught when watching Unsolved Mysteries, but the clue is in the name and I never find out and it bums me the flub out. Ever since I put Crystal in this very same facility, people have been questioning me, my DM’s went mad, my WhatsApp was insane with messages and they asked the correct question. Why? Yet, Crystal is now tweeting again, and she states I concussed her. I had hoped it would be more serious than that which is sadly not the case. Yet, she and her stupid little buffoon off a daughter spouting off at me but the reason no-one asked why was because I made them happy. I did what everyone wanted. Yes, Amber defeated her, but I hospitalised that stupid bitch. I have received presents, messages congratulating me, and you are all welcome. I didn’t do it for you but why did I do it, though? You had better ask Crystal. She knows which is why she hasn’t even bothered to ask the correct question.
Her face starts to go deeply pale; her eyes turn black as she stares deeply at us for what feels like an eternity but then she smiles, and her eyes turn back to normal.
“Look, in time you will know why but for now just think of the wonderful journey you will take to get to that point where the truth shall be set free but for now let’s make the most of Crystal crying her eyes out about her concussion. Now it is time to focus on Bobbie Dahl. So, Roberta, you are next in line to take a massive beating but your time in the ring was before my tenure here so it is rather akin to a blind date. You turn up, not knowing what to expect, see someone who doesn’t look like their description, you may just decide to go for it and have a bit of a fondle and maybe a grope, then leave them dazed and confused as you walk out of their life forever, moving onwards and upwards.
This is not just any old match, oh no siree bob, this is not a normal minge bashing minger in front of me, this is the friend or whatever of that Tempest slag. I am not scared of her, of you, of anyone. I never have been but I have been playing this little wallflower, with no direction, just flowing in the wind, listless and devoid of any vicious thoughts. A god damned pussy is what I was. Alicia woke me up big time. Now I got this chubby runt to face whose biggest claim to fame is she was a wrestler and a friend of someone that is super scared of soap. Bobbie, I feel for you, honeylove, oh I really do. If this match had been signed a couple of weeks ago, I am pretty sure you would have won. The timing is off for you on this one. You got full bore Maki and I do not let trifling, impotent, has-beens come close to my level. Do you think you can grandstand and piggyback of the mega star that is Maki? The greatest signing this company ever made. Oh, I know what you will bring to the table judging from what I have been told but I could check the network and look back through your matches but frankly I do not give a rats arse what you done before Roberta because you will feel my wrath for all those months of pathetic pondering, all of those months of being someone I wasn’t and tonight you will face your fears. You fear me I know it. I seen you on the socially unacceptable media. You are all about scraping with the underlings but when its time to face the woman that holds your ambition in her hands you will freeze.”
Blood started to fall out of her eyes, so she wiped it and stared back at us with a sly grin on her face.
“Roberta, I am certain you shall play the game, diss me to the heavens, state how you will eradicate me from the planet, detail how you will win against the British Sensation...blah blah blah. Talk it up sunshine. You see I might be spouting off against you but hell that’s all part of it, right? We are here to promote the match. I get it. You might even talk trash about me and my recent win/loss record, you may use that as a stick to beat me with but you know I love to be beaten up and then come back ten times harder than I was before. You see, baby girl, you’re not just facing a nutter, someone who believes she has a demon lurking inside her, you are facing the new and improved Melissa Aki and I will slowly eradicate you piece by piece. I shall play with you, toy with you like a cat with a mouse, then emotionally, spiritually and psychologically I will rip your psyche until you are a groveling mess, then I will force my hand inside your chest, rip your beating heart out of it and chew that fucker until I gorge myself on your hot, insipid, blood. Every match I come prepared for war and when it is said and done you will be a shell of the person you were before. This is not just a match for me, this is a warning shot across the bow to every god damn woman in this forsaken place. I am coming for you…I am coming to rip your soul from your weak and disgusting bodies. Know this: Failure is NEVER an option!”
She pushes the camera back and cracks against the wall, we spin around until we see the floors on a sideways glance, and there walking super-fast, like a crab, sprinting to the camera is Maki as we go to white noise.
