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The street outside my uncle's store was full of mackerel when the nun entered. Two men were hitting each other with dead fishes, bashing each other on the sides of the head. It sounded like the whole city was honking. The locals were walking, sliding, up and down the sidewalk.
"Milk?" I asked the nun. She was in every Thursday. Forty-three-years-old, according to my uncle.
"Not today," she said.
I walked to the counter. She had a paper bag there, from the Broadway, the department store. I looked in it as she glanced out the window. It was full of ladies' wigs, red and blond and brunette.
I needed to wash my hair.
Outside the store, the two men had each other by their scalps. The one man--bigger than the other--had the other guy against the roof of the rig. The big man was the truck driver. He had a fish in his hand, and he was shoving it into the other guy's mouth.
"You ever watch the fights?" the nun asked.
"No," I told her, "just wrestling."
"There's nothing I like more than the fights," the nun said. She walked to the window.
"How much you wash your hair?" Tim had asked earlier that day at lunch, at school. "How much?" People were always asking that, saying that. He knew how much. I'd told him. I couldn't help it. His hair was "business cut" short, parted on the left, clean. I hit him, slammed him with a palm to his forehead.
"Yeah," I told the nun. "Those fights are something."
She turned to me and smiled. "You could fight," she said. She walked toward me, put her hands on my arms, around my biceps, rubbed them down to my wrists and up again, pressed her hands into my flesh. They were bruised and bony, like old trees. The fingers twisted in odd directions at each knotted joint.
"You have a fighter's arms," she said.
I pulled away, my hands feeling these arms.
The small man was among the fish on the pavement. The truck driver stood over him, reeling. In the distance, sirens.
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