Fluorescent Fighters

A short story I wrote based on Ovid's Minerva and Arachne.

Rosalind descends in the dark elevator. She runs her hand across the names carved into metallic walls. Roz+Fighters ’08, Roz Mitchell ’06, The Fluorescent Fighters ’09. A broken smile creeps across her damaged face. Scars everywhere. The countless times her fellow fighters had punched her, slapped her, kicked her, clawed her, she remained the same. She was known as the Fight Goddess. She was like a rock, stronger than most men. The elevator stops abruptly. She is calm. The lights flicker once more until they finally extinguish. With inhuman strength, she forces the doors open, this seems perfectly normal to her. Hushed voices are heard.  Rosalind jumps onto the cement floor of her nightly fight club.

Cockroaches scuttle across the floor. Fluorescent lights flicker, reflected on their hard, glossy shells. The fighters play games with them. Whoever can squish the most wins.
Computer consultants by day, fighters by night. Real estate brokers by day, fighters by night. Even actors, artists, writers. Everyone. As for Rosalind, fighting is her life. Everything to her.
The crowd is absolutely silent. A silence of immense respect. She is god to all of them.

All of a sudden, a figure steps out of the shadows.

“Roz right?”

“What?” she asks, startled.

“Your fight club, I’m in the right place?”

“And you are?”

“My folks call me Spider.”

“You’re a man?”

“Yeah. Ya have a problem with that?”

“Go spin your web somewhere else. We’re all women here.”

“You think you’re better than me, don’t you.”

“No.”

“Of course you do, Ms. Fight Goddess.”

“What do you want?”

“Gimme your best shot.”

Rosalind looks up at him; she takes a deep breath and throws a punch to his left cheek. He staggers back, stunned at her vigor.

“You surprised, spider boy?”

“From a girl? I don’t think so. None of you can fight and you think you’re all goddesses, your just pathetic girls sitting at the foot of Mount Olympus.”

Spider punches her back, matching her incredible force. Rosalind falls to the ground, unharmed. She gets up immediately, and shakes off the pain, something well practiced.

“This is what they mean when they say ‘fight like a girl.’”

He stands, preparing for the finishing blow.

‘’’Nature intended women to be our slaves. They are our property, we are not theirs...They belong to us, just as a tree belongs to the gardener,’” he hisses.

“Is that one yours?”

“Napoleon Bonaparte.”

“I like this one better. It’s Kafka. ‘One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.’ I think you and Gregor have something in common.”

She stares at him, her eyes piercing his skin. His nose and ears fall off and head is shrunken, a hard shell starts to grow on this back. 

But the cockroach has not forgotten his true power. He scuttles back into the darkness, to join his fellows, invincible, indestructible.