EYE-BRANDED

My fight opens with me making a series of ineffective lunges and haymaker swings toward my opponent. He easily dodges or blocks each one, and he responds to each one with a hard punch in my belly.

Each of these counterpunches makes me recoil and grab my belly. But he holds his fire and lets me recover myself and go at him again. And again he baffles me and whomps me in the stomach. These jabs to the belly take their toll on me, and soon I'm puffing and wheezing and weak.

She knows he is doing this to impress her. It angers her against him. But another part of her is turned on by it all.

That's when he gives me the big uppercut in the stomach. That does it. As someone calls out "bellyslammer!" and they all laugh and cheer, I grab my belly and "OOF" out loud and body-rock up and down convulsively while my wobbly knees try to move me away from him. I lose balance and dash to my knees, body upright, still gutpunched and lost in a bellyache.

He walks in front of me. Wide-eyed, I clench my hands and hold them up in a begging gesture. But he mercilessly kicks me in the belly. Black boot to white belly. My whole body jolts, freezes, wide-eyed, and then I pitch forward, face-down, belly-first. And quickly I flop over onto my back, writhing and shaking, stomach thrust up, arms and legs fish-flopping, in the helpless zombie-dance of the winded.

... wind knocked out of me ...

The necessary other-half of the humiliation belly-punch. I let myself get so vulnerable that she saw a man square his arm and ram his fist straight into my helpless belly. And it stripped all the self-control from me, and made me a physical fool in front of her.

That specific and humiliating way I responded to the shock and body-panic of a sharp punch in the stomach. The potbellied, kettle-drum impact thud, then the clownish OOF! sound I make.

Then the achingly long seconds of my breathless silence. The full throes of it, when my diaphragm just won't budge to let my lungs draw air. That frozen, dying feeling. The spear of pain that he lunged into my stomach transfixing me, crucifix and san sebastian in one pose, pinned bug. Every second it goes on adds a lead weight to my humiliation. Every second I lie there stunned and gape-mouthed, tear-streaming, unbreathing, the brand burns deeper into my belly.

The brand is her gaze, whether she wills it or not.

Finally I draw a breath, but a scant one, and quickly bleated back out. And so it goes, breaths coming more rapidly, but my bellyache still owns me, and I can only grunt and bray and make sour faces -- uuuh! ooooouu!

All that from one punch right in my belly. Even if it was a cheap shot, a boy's supposed to be able to take one or two stomach punches, or at least recover quickly from them. But there I am, still down and belly-punched, long past a count of ten, if there had been one. The panic possessing me, my body writhing in embarrassing tortured poses I would never allow her to see me assume. A head-to-toe picture of complete male failure.

She's not a bad girl. Really. She tells herself. To like this, a little? She looks at me and knows, pityingly, that I'll always be shy of her because I am ashamed that she watched me get my belly beat up. That's what a nice girl would feel, right? A girl that's not a bully's slut.

My belly is right there when he takes his victory stomp/pin.

Before he's finished with me, he's given me a nickname -- oof-belly. And that's what he and his gang will be calling me, loudly and publicly, for a few days at least, until they tire of mocking my belly and move on to some other sport. I hope. Meanwhile the other girls who did not see the fight, will hear them taunt me and go ask her what it's all about. And she will retell it in detail many times. Some will want to hear it more than once.

Yes, It's Deliberate

It's the stun of awareness that hits you when you get a punch in the belly in intimacy.

This person, who makes you feel like he just rammed your stomach up your lungs with a casual shove of his fist, is loving this.

Is getting off on it. On having given you that punch right plump in your gut.

Your lover erased your person-hood for the duration of your suffering. And the sight of you proving it, writhing and belly-aching, is an erotic delight.

The eyes that sparkle as they watch you get humiliated by a belly-punch -- those eyes deliver the second wallop, the invisible follow up punch, the one that takes all the voice out of you, the one that hits your soular plexus.

ALL in a DAY'S WORK

He's facing the crowd, posing and smiling. You seem to think he doesn't see you get up. You walk up behind him with your belly stuck out. And he just jerks his arm back and mashes his elbow into your stomach.

OOF! Instant bellyache. You fold in at the shoulders and grab your stomach with both hands and spin around. You stagger away from him with all the breath socked out of you.

Everyone in the arena is thinking the same thing. The announcer simply puts it into words. In long, low tones, "uuh! Right in the belly!" It hits you like the stamp of a brand -- right in the belly. Soft-bellied wimp. Can't take it in the belly.

Still breathless, you stagger stupidly to the edge of the ring and drop to your knees there, hands still pressed to your stomach. Tragic-mouthed, bug-eyed, you finally get a feeble breath into your stung lungs, only to wail it right out again, "oh, my BELLY!"

Yes, you waste your precious breath on announcing the obvious. Every eye on you can already tell that, yes, you got elbowed in the belly. Especially those giggling three in the front row, who are pointing at your belly as you lean against the ropes and sag your half-stripped body toward the crowd.

Then you feel a big grip in your scalp, and you're rotated by your hair, while you hear his voice call out, over you, "get your belly back up here, so I can beat you properly," addressing you, but bawling it out for the crowd. And with that, he's thrown your arms back over the top rope, and pinned them there in the tangled ropes, so you're slumped belly-open, arms wide.

He can beat you at his leisure, for the entertainment of the crowd. He grips you under the chin and pushes your head back, forcing you to arch your back and thrust up your stomach. Then he raises a fist, which you cannot see but which looms like a hammer over your helpless belly, and lets it hang there a second so everyone in the house -- except you -- can see what's coming.

Your upside-down view of the crowd shows their faces lit with expectation, some shocked, some cringing, some laughing. Then he drops the hammer on your stomach.

Your body jolts in shock and you blare the effect of the punch from head to toe. Head jerks, mouth opens to OOF out the impact, body falls back into the ropes but can't drop. Legs kick helplessly, fingers clench in suffering. You can't escape till he pulls you out of it. You're hung up there like a belly punching bag. And he's in a mood to show off.

SYMPHONY in OOF

"Come in," she said. I opened the door, and caught my breath, though I managed not to gasp. She stood across the room, just turning as I entered, casually setting a glass on the table, a moment framed so perfectly she must have been a long time setting it up.

She wore her belly-dance gear. The one I like best, the dull gray-blue one, the one that almost vanishes into the background when she wears it, so that her dance becomes a whirl all of bare hips and belly, fingertips and smiles, navel-kisses fluttered with every step.

And the gold sandals, and her hair set just so, and as she turned to face me she let her hips tip toward me, back-arching, belly-flaunting, and she looked me in the eye and arched one brow and smiled.

Invitation is too weak a word. She knew what she did to me. She knew all my erotic buttons, and what happened when you punched a fistful of them all at once. I began to walk toward her.

And I walked right into a bellypunch. He must have been right behind the door, because I didn't get one step past it when I saw a big brawny arm swing around from my side and plunge a brass-balled fist plump into my stomach. It was a perfectly placed punch in the gut and it took the wind right out of my belly with an OOUFF!!! I doubled right up, with a big, bad belly-ache.

There were two of them, it turned out. I saw the other after he hauled me back upright. I was still folded in half mouth toward the floor, my stunned belly still frozen breathless. I felt my hands pulled behind my back and someone tied my wrists there. Then they un-jacked me with one hand, and forced me upright, and they both presented me open-bellied to her.

Her twin muscle-thugs held my arms tightly on either side. As if I was going to try anything with my wrists already tied behind me. Or maybe they just did it to make me look vulnerable to her.

They held me up in front of her and let her casually look me up and down, and back again. She stepped casually past me, her hand lingering down the front of me as I shivered shirtless.

"Take him down to the dungeon," she purred to the twin towers behind me, "and beat up his belly."

They hustled me down the steps and threw me down on my bare belly on the cold concrete floor. I was perspiring in fear and my belly hit the icy floor with a soft splat. I heard her chuckle, then the stiletto click of her heels on the floor. Then I saw her in front of me -- or, exactly, I saw her sumptuous pumps and perfect painted toes. Because one of the goons had his knee pressed to my back to hold me down. The other apparently was tying my ankles together, and lifting them up enough to hook them to something.

"Something" turned out to be a boat-engine lift, and with a touch of her slender hand on a switch (and the big thugs roughing me along), she had me hoisted up, hanging upside down, ankle-bound and hands tied behind my back. She let it lift until she was about eye-level with my navel, then she locked it there.

She strode slowly up to me. She set a fingertip in my navel, then dragged it down to the center of my belly, midway to my sternum. She paused, bent down, and planted a lipstick kiss on me there. Then she turned and walked away.

"Now," she told them. "Give it to him in the belly. I want to see which one of you can make him 'OOF!' loudest. I marked it so you won't miss. Punch him on the kiss."

The chain or cord that held me was anchored to a free-rotating wheel, so they could turn me to face any direction in my helpless pose. The brawlers took up position on opposite sides, and began a game with my helpless belly.

One would grab me by the hair, which I have plenty of, and turn my body to face him, navel-out. Then he'd line up his shot and deliver some sort of show-off-y chop or punch into my stomach.

Disoriented, flipped, spun, dazed, I had no hope of anticipating their blows to my bread-basket and no hope of resisting them. The height she had me, they could swing straight jabs and overhand shots right into the "sweet spot" of my gut, and get the breath of me every time. The kind of sharp, shocking blows that in a typical fight only go to the head. In this beating I took them in the belly.

First one would jerk his fist into my soft stomach or jab an elbow into the pit of my belly. And stand back and let her watch me suffer. Then she'd signal the other one to take his turn.

I swung like a pot-belly pinata while they took their whacks on my bread-basket. She cooed and purred them on the whole time, teasing and suggesting what the winner might enjoy.

Henchman

All my life I've secretly been a henchman at heart, not a hero.

You know, a henchman: The gang of helpers and lackeys who gather about the Bad Guy in the story or the movie. The ones whose only function is to get beaten up in the big fist-fight brawl scene -- beaten like fools, dispatched quickly, vigorously, and visibly by the hero. Often all it took was a series of chops to the belly. One of the fine arts of henchmanship was knowing how to charge out into a fistfight with your belly stuck out like it was searching for a fist to "OOF" against.