A heady smog of cinnamon and ginger cleansed the nostrils of Amelia Meen as she feverishly juggled her intimidating checklist of festive tasks. David Bowie’s bursts of pa rum pum pum pum fought against the guttural rumination of the food processor, the shrill chimes of jangled cutlery and the sudden burst of excitement that was the oven timer.

“Marty,” she broadcast in a tone that had trended towards the nagging over the years. “Come get one while they’re hot.”

The tell-tale brands of a baker showed on her upturned forearms as she retrieved a tray of Christmas tree cookies from the oven, a sudden waft of spiced air steaming her bifocals. As her apron shined her lenses, unfocussed olive eyes squinted towards the door to the garage where she awaited her husband’s emergence, traipsing oil over her flour-dusted linoleum.

“Must have those silly earphones in,” Amelia mumbled to herself as a fine blizzard of icing sugar drifted down upon the cookies. “What does a man of his age want with one of those iPod things anyway. Don’t know what Cynthia was thinking buying him one.”

As Amelia returned to stirring the treacly elixir in her mixing bowl, the beckoning chorus of Let It Snow was granted its magical festive wish. Swapping her churning spoon for a pallet knife, each Christmas tree cookie was transferred to their cooling rack with maternal delicacy, save for the one misshape of the batch.

“Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!” Amelia puffed as even her asbestos fingertips were singed by the oven-hot misshapen cookie she juggled between her hands before dropping onto a kitchen paper-topped plate. After fixing her tightly curled hair in the reflective door of the microwave, she clutched the plate in both heat-blushed hands and marched towards the garage door.

With each step toward the door, the mulled air’s aroma was polluted, no longer tickling the nose but sticking in the throat. Short, sharp sniffs caused Amelia’s brow to descend and crease in curiosity. “Marty?”

Amelia prodded the door open with a blue-plastered index finger, inviting a choking charcoal cloud into her kitchen. The heady scent of spice succumbed to the sickly sweet tang of gasoline and the plate the heaving Amelia was carrying shattered against the sill of the door.

“Marty!” she screamed in panic, before spluttering as tainted air was sucked into the bellows of her lungs.

Filtering the asphyxiating cloud through her apron, Amelia staggered through the dense blanket of fumes, trying in vain to wave a clearing with frantic swipes of the tea-towel clenched in her right hand. The grumble of Martin Meen’s ‘67 Chevy C-10 pick-up filled his wife’s ears as the exhaust fumes it expelled seeped behind Amelia’s glasses, stinging her watering eyes.

“Marty!“ Amelia continued to scream into the disorienting mist. Desperately swiping towards a switch that hung down from the roof on a thick cable, Amelia triggered the opening of the garage door, purging the dense, sickly cloud out into a frigid, crystalline air. Wincing eyes followed a length of green sprinkler tubing through the pick-up’s window, against which the bleached, lifeless face of her husband was pressed. She crumbled to her knees, shock numbing the dull throb from the impact of patella on concrete, and a pained, broken scream shattered every snowflake that fell on Cedar Avenue.

Arms crossed, timidly, Eleanor Hall impatiently shuffled on the perilous heels of her Jimmy Choos. A tongue-coating stench of ripe sweat suffocated the air, and through the peeling and crumbling walls, the primal roars and screeches of the locker room’s animal kingdom triggered nervous flinches from the aspiring valet.

“Well, well, well,” oozed a lecherous growl. “Fancy someone leaving a pretty little thing like you out here, all by your lonesome.”

The trembling Eleanor Hall was frozen rigid as the seedy words licked icily at her spine. Still wheezing from his main event effort, “The Martyr” Martin Meen shuffled down the corridor, sweat pouring off him as the stifling trek back to the locker rooms offered not one single revitalising breeze. She kept quiet, waiting for the drawn-out squeaks of boot soles over tacky floor tiles to pass. Instead, they screeched to a halt, inches shy of her.

Ellie’s arms tightened across her, shoulders hunching, eyes down.

“Anything could happen to such a sweet, innocent creature around these savages,” Meen whispered. An invasive finger drew back her platinum locks so that he could slither his serpentine words into his ear with a flick of the tongue. “What you need is a big, strong man to look after you… and I’m big in all the right places, Blondie. Not like that ginger runt of yours.”

At 6’6 and 341 pounds, Meen engulfed the petite, petrified valet as he ground himself into her. Face souring, Ellie squirmed as Martin pressed his chin down on her shoulder, globby beads of sweat dropping down onto her chest where her seismic heartbeat shook them down her floaty top.

Enveloping his shivering prey with a constricting hug, Meen began to rock his hips back and forth. As her fitted leather jacket was hitched up, sickly sweet vomit tried to claw its way up her throat as she felt against the small of her back that a part of The Martyr’s post-match wind-down ritual was to peel himself out of his sweat-drenched trunks.

“See, there’s an understanding back here,” he growled, mimicking bites at her exposed neck. “This locker room? It’s mine. I see something I want, it’s mine. I see a move I want to steal? It’s mine. I see an girl I want… it’s mine.”

Feeling the pressure on the small of her back, um, harden, Ellie screwed her face up, retreating into herself so that all Martin Meen could dry-hump was an empty shell.

As the locker room door swung open, Meen didn’t even look up, his shadowed, chestnut eyes instead tracking the beads of his sweat down Eleanor’s chest. Three men emerged, jostling through the frame. The lead pair were instantly forgettable, but the man they’d barged past… had something.

In possession of a toned body he hadn’t quite grown into yet, the man sported a lion’s mane of strawberry blonde hair, tamed in a braided ponytail, leaving polished emerald eyes to dominate his face. A stubble beard that didn’t quite join up around the corners of his mouth carpeted the lower half of his fresh, blemish-free face, while a thin white shirt hung off him to show a body devoid of ink or scarring.

A lot can happen to a man in 9 years.

Bouncing between his two belly-laughing roster-mates, the young Christian Alexander Kannon mimicked the men whose spots he was plotting to take, forcing a cackle out… until he looked up. Before either man could move, a ferocious stare branded the deep-set eyes of Martin Meen, whose yearning dribble hung from his bottom lip.

“GET OFF OF HER YOU PIECE OF SHI-” exploded from deep within Kannon as he burst towards Meen… only to be dragged back by the other two men, their loyalty to the locker room held above basic humanity. “GET. OFF. ME. NOW!”

A chuckle spluttered out of the salivating Martyr’s nose as he watched a possessed Kannon lash about in his restraints, foaming at the mouth and gnashing his teeth. A fierce yank of his ponytail tried to bring Kannon to heel, but still he struggled and squirmed, muscles almost tearing themselves off bone to contort free.

“You know the rules,” Meen lectured, punishing Kannon’s insolence by dragging a squealing Ellie down to the floor by her long, platinum blonde hair. “This ain’t your house, this is my house, and you should always bring a little something for your host as a sign of… appreciation.”

Icy exterior shattering, Ellie was finally broken. Terror-etched features and anaemic eyes pleaded to Kannon, whose struggling intensified.

“You’re no fun,” Meen spat in the trembling Eleanor’s ear. Forcefully expelling her from his hair-woven grip, The Martyr bounced Ellie’s head sickeningly off the dusty floor tile to a pained yelp. “No time to break a new bitch in if she ain’t willing.”

Senses dulled and eyes glazed, a groggy Eleanor Hall dabbed her bleeding forehead with a trembling hand as Martin placed both his meaty paws on her clenching ass to push himself up with a laboured, unsatisfied groan.

“I… I am going to fucking END you,” Kannon threatened, hissing from deep within himself as his squirming ceased. The words were cold, potent and deliberate. Real.

“Listen hear you little shit-smear,” snarled Meen as his underlings wrestled Kannon down to his knees. “You will never amount to shit in this business. You will spend every night of your miserable little career crawling about on the floor fighting for whatever scraps I throw down the card. You will not end me, because you envy me. All this… is mine. All you’ve got is your pretty boy face and that ass-less Blonde tramp I just wiped my dick off on…”

Before the baited Kannon could rise up, The Martyr thrust his boot out, branding the tread into Kannon’s cheek. As Ellie screamed, Meen continued his assault with a lick of his lips, aroused by the helplessness of her reaction.

“Stop!” the sobbing Ellie heaved from her diaphragm.

Lashing his fist back and forth, Martin Meen’s knuckles tore into the fresh young flesh of Kannon’s face, painting a grotesque crimson masterpiece across the once flawless canvas. The frenzied burst of violence ticked to a halt, timed to the pendulum of Kannon’s limp head. Taking uneasy delight in looking down upon the sobbing Ellie, Meen suggestively wiped the blood off his hands and down his thighs.

“So…” The Martyr stated, turning back to Kannon. “Is there anything you’d like to say to me now?”

Kannon dropped his head back, and blood welled up in his eye-sockets where the banks of his swollen brows had been burst by the lashings of Meen’s knuckles. Face re-sculpted by fist, Kannon’s split lips could barely part, but he managed to force a few pained words out for The Martyr’s benefit.

“I… I will end y-”

Before he could finish, Kannon’s lips were sealed by a ferocious stamp by Meen that extinguished the final flicker of fight within him.

“Get them out of my sight,” Martin ordered of his lackeys. “Neither of them are welcome back here.”

“Ab… so… lute… ly…” Marty Meen wheezed, needing to gulp down a mouthful of air between each syllable. He raised a pulsing index finger to pause the conversation as a glug of icy water swirled down his arid throat. “Everyone is welcome here.”

Arms, patched together with seams of barb-wire scars, spread to proudly welcome the newest member of Marty’s Gym. Originality did not reside under its roof.

Marty removed his stars and stripes bandana, underneath which his thinning, greying hair had been plastered down across his burning scalp. Gone were the days where he’d spend every Thursday night ensuring, chemically, that he’d be sporting a jet black mane of long hair ready for Friday’s crowd, or finding ways to ensure the balding crown of his skull didn’t catch the harsh lights and blind the front row with the obvious truth that he wasn’t 25 anymore. In fact, gone was just about all he could shed of his “The Martyr” character, most noticeably about 75 pounds.

Even in his deflated form, Marty still dwarfed the young woman before him, who was dressed every bit as modern as the gym was rustic. A razor-sharp brunette bob was speared either side of her head by the bold arms of oversized dark Roberto Cavalli sunglasses, both contrasted by a blinding white mink coat raised off the floor only by her five inch satin Jimmy Choo heels.

“Sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” Marty delicately probed as he felt every eye in the gym gravitate towards her. “But… I… have we met before, somewhere?”

“Oh, how rude of me,” her cherry lips spoke, embarrassed. “Alexander. Christine Alexander. I’ve only just moved here with my son Christian so, no, I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure. My loss, I‘m sure. It‘s so nice to see someone willing to help out the community, keep the youngsters out of trouble. You‘re a local hero, Marty Meen.”

It had started with a hefty prod from his wife, sick of him moping at home, bitter about his body retiring from the squared circle a few years before his heart was willing to tap out. Two years later, it was still a work in progress that was a less-than-charitable safety inspector away from another $10,000 repair bill, but it was his. He’d gone from muttering to the television, alone in a bout of drunken depression to enthralling the children and grandchildren of friends and neighbours with heroic tales of his glory days. The wallpaper may have been peeling, but newspaper cuttings spanning four decades plastered over the cracks.

Flustered by the lady’s charm offensive, Marty fumbled his water bottle between sweaty fingertips, spilling it across the chipped varnish of the floorboards. Beneath the young woman’s polite disguise, a foul-mouthed rant about how much her now damp shoes cost hammered against the surface, unable to break out.

“Oh, I’m sorry… clumsy of me… do you wa-”

“It’s fine,” she forced out through a smile that masked snarling teeth. “Now, shall we get all the forms out of the way? I can‘t wait for us to start…”

Grimacing through the dull ache of his back, Marty Meen swept his gym’s dusty floor, trying to support himself with the broom as best he could. A phlegmy cough worked its way slowly up his throat, leaving him breathless.

Clap… clap… clap…

Marty froze, clinging to the broom for support as squinting eyes peered out, trying to pierce the shadows. Clenching his teeth, Marty stretched out his cramping back, spine locking rigid at the cost of a pained wince.

“Who’s there?” Meen demanded to know, brandishing the broom as a staff. Aging, broken down body rigid like a terracotta warrior. “Bill, this better not be you screwing about again. I told you no Christmas surprises.”

Clap… clap… clap…

“We don’t keep any money here,” he delivered in a deep, husky growl. “Or drugs, save for a couple of Aspirin.”

Eyes, narrowed under the weight of heavily suspicious brows, traced a click-clack of footsteps circling him, keeping to the shady extremities of the gym. Fingers crackled as they tightened around the broom handle. A lone, feint light flickered on, illuminating a column of thick dust that hung in the stuffy air.

Then, into the light, a woman stepped.

“Christine?” trickled slowly off of Marty’s bemused tongue. “What are you..?”

She remained statuesque, imprisoned within the amber glow, motionless save for cherry lips relaxing into the most mischievous of grins. Then, pristinely manicured fingers freed a glossy mane of platinum blonde hair from under its brunette bob veil. As his jaw gave into gravity, the woman removed her hazel contacts to liberate the purest, powder blue irises that Martin Meen ever did see.

“You?” swerved hazardously between shame and shock. “But… yo-”

Clap… clap… clap…

From the shadows, a blurry figure pounded, scything Marty’s legs out from under him. “Ghah-huh-huh-hyuk!” was expelled as he crashed down on the had floor, lungs jettisoning air upon impact. “Uyuk... uck… who’s th-”

His wheezed question was silenced as a boot pressed down across his throat. Then, from above, an onslaught of heavenly light. As his deeply crow-footed eyes peeled their lids back, Martin Meen was left staring up at a man from his past, glowing in a halo of dusty amber. Tufts of bright red hair peeked out from under a black ski-hat with a chin strap of black, tightly trimmed beard. Enclosed within the dark border were a pair of vivid green, vengeful, hate-filled eyes.

“You… always together…”

“Me,” sneered Xavier Kannon.

“I’m here to deliver on a promise, Marty,” Kannon declared, barbed words clawing their way into Meen’s ears. “When you’d tired of violating the mother of my children, when you had me held down by two of your attack dogs, beating lumps out of my face, I told you… I gave you a damn fucking prophesy that one day I would end you.”

“Lo-” Meen tried to plead, only for Kannon’s boot to once again press down across his throat.

“No,” Xavier adjudged. “You don’t get to talk.”

Striding up beside her husband, Eleanor looked down at the snivelling, squirming Martin Meen. Her expression couldn’t settle, morphing between repulsed, disdainful and pity as the emotions swirled around her brain, bleeding into one another like a kaleidoscope.

“I want you to know that this isn’t for me,” Xavier spoke with chilling assuredness. “Tomorrow morning, at midday, five of the boys that come to this gym - including a young whipper-snapper by the name of Christian Alexander, had dinner with his parents the other night, lovely people - will walk into that precinct just across the street and tell a nice policeman some very, very disturbing stories about what you did to them.”

Marty felt the vomit begin to seep up his throat at the very thought of the accusation.

“I ne-” Meen breathlessly mouthed, unable to vocalise the words. “I never did…”

“But you did, Marty,” condemned Kannon. “Each and every accusation made will be something you did… one of which I had to watch personally while your lackeys stopped me looking away. You might not have done it to the kids here, but let’s make no mistake about this; you did do it.”

Stooping down, a curious Xavier read the quivering lips of the reddening Marty.

“It’s all too easy to be sorry when someone just brought your life crashing down around you,” Kannon scoffed, time having made him immune to the sincerity. “Will you say sorry when a parade of character witnesses is ushered into court to reminisce about the good ol’ days with The Martyr? Be good to see that barely-legal little valet you thought was a bit too dirty a blonde. Remember? You got your boys to hold her down so you could blow your load in her hair, huh? Or, hey, what about that skinny little guy you thought carried himself a bit too feminine for your liking? You had your fun with him. I’d remind you of what you did, but, once they send you down you’ll be living it daily for the rest of your life. Want me to go on? Want me to grab that broom handle and help you remember what you did to that poor green little rookie whose 110 pounds soaking wet couldn’t slow you down before you hit the guard rail? Maybe this one will splinter just like it did back then, huh?”

Having to fight the urge not to channel all his weight down onto Meen’s constricted trachea, Kannon pulled himself away, leaving Marty to wither into the foetal position, almost turning himself inside out with violent heaves.

Ellie shuffled away, cold eyes devoid of all sympathy in the wake of her husband‘s words..

“This is a decent world,” Kannon declared as he backed away from his neutered victim and took his wife‘s hand. “You’re no longer welcome in it.”

Chipped teeth clamped Marty Meen’s quivering bottom lip in place. A deep, nasal breath swelled his proud chest. Three slow, deliberate turns of the handle brought the driver’s side window up, pinning the green plastic piping in place just inches from his pitted, tear-streamed face.

He crossed his chest, then ripped off the crucifix that hung around his neck, squeezing it so tightly that it punctured his hand’s leathery skin. Deep in the seat that had moulded around him with time, Marty’s body trembled as the engine of his ‘67 Chevy C-10 pick-up spluttered into life with its usual angry-at-being-disturbed grumble.

He’d grown up hearing how this was easy. How he could take or leave it if he pleased.

Throat swelling, Marty swallowed down any second thoughts, buttoned his collar, then closed his eyes. Outside it began to snow. Out of the hose pipe began to trickle a festering, charcoal smog, filling his cab with a sickly sweet, dizzying aroma. Deep breaths. Stifled coughs.

His head began to ache as a stabbing pain emanated from his temples. Teeth ground. Throat muscles tensed. Nostrils stung. Each breath stripped away at his nostrils, scorching his lungs.

He rocked in his chair, humming.

Quieter and quieter.

Despite the inviting lure of the roaring open fire, it was the pale glow of a monitor’s screen that illuminated the studious face of Xavier Kannon. As eyes scanned down the screen his features neutralised, wiping itself blank with every row. His focus entrenched in the text, thoughts racing, recalling, visualising, he didn’t sense the soft pitter-patter of tip-toes in the soft carpet behind him.

“Whatchadoing?” teased a playful Ellie as she latched tightly onto her husband.

As suddenly as his wife had pounced, Kannon jumped back to his desktop wallpaper.

“Um, nothing,” he mumbled, realigning his focus, “just checking Adrienne didn’t cheap us on our flights.”

“Let’s see,“ his unimpressed wife sighed. “The twins are both dead to the world, I’m pressed against you in a scandalously short robe with only Hubbard knows what underneath it, we’re 10 feet away from a soft, comfy rug in front of a blazing fire… and you’re checking work stuff?”

“That’s pretty bad, isn’t it?” he conceded.

“Mmm-hmm,” she playfully replied, pressing her glossy lips against his neck as she hummed.

“Well,” he softly purred, reaching back to gently rub the tip of her nose with his index finger. “If you go get comfy, then I’ll be with you in just one minute… and make it worth the wait.”

“One minute,” she echoed.

“One minute,” he assured.

“Better make it worth it,” Ellie whispered into his ear as she skipped towards the fireplace on tip-toes, shed her robe, and tossed it back at her husband.

As the silk grazed over his beard, Xavier brought the window back up, lips tracing the text.

“Former 80’s wrestling superstar “The Martyr” Martin Meen dies age 57 in four vehicle wreck. Leaves no family behind. Numerous wrestlers leave glowing tributes. Thousand expected at funeral.”