She reached out her hand, battered and bruised, and found her father’s hand to hold.
She tried to bend her fingers around his fingers, but they were too stiff and sore to move.
She took a slow, deep breath through her mouth into her tired lungs.
She couldn’t breathe in through her nose.
Her opponent had broken it in the second round with a left hook and it was stuffed with packing gauze.
“Oh well,” she thought, “I’m just a migrant kid and a boxer. My face doesn’t matter. Only my heart and my hands do.”
She breathed out through her swollen, cracked lips and sighed.
She felt the pain of boxing.
It was deep and aching in her stomach and moved out as weakness into her arms and legs, moved out as despair into her mind and heart.
A lump formed in her throat.
She closed her eyes and a tear rolled down her cheek and onto the dust and dirt of the floor of the dark, quiet room.
She knew then, so deeply and clearly, why her father worked the fields in bare feet, why he wore the same clothes day after day and year after year.
She knew why he took so little of the food he prepared for the family.
In that moment, she realized how much her father loved her and how much she loved him.
She realized her father was beautiful.
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