Sometimes after I lift weights, my shoulders broadest, my chest thickest, my step a little slower, I picture myself as Kane.
The Big Red Machine. The Demon.
The Undertaker’s little brother.
The brother he left for dead in a childhood fire. The brother who came back to haunt him in 1997, thirsty for revenge. Thirsty for fire and damnation. Thirsty for choke slams and piledrivers.
Kane evolved before our eyes, over a decade. Starting a masked monster, hell bent on revenge. Becoming management’s hired gun. Falling in love and having his heart broken. When he was forced to unmask, he went a little crazier, setting a play-by-play aflame, clamping a jumper cables to another wrestler’s testicles.
Then, he reunited with his brother—The Brothers of Destruction—a team too big, too strong, too supernaturally insurmountable to be challenged.
In 2010, he put his brother in the hospital.
It was all a part of Kane’s plan, you see. To scout his brother. To test him. To win his trust over years and years and years only to gain the advantage. To become unbeatable when they clashed for the last time.
And though I picture myself like Kane, in biceps, in gait, in intensity, this may be what appeals most. That my every word, my every tragedy, my every pratfall, my every triumph—that it all might mean something.
That I might convince someone—not least of all myself—it was all part of a master plan.
Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York and is currently an MFA candidate in creative writing at Oregon State University. He won the 2014 Jim Knudsen Editor’s Prize for fiction from the University of New Orleans and has previously published or has work forthcoming in over thirty journals including The Normal School, Bayou Magazine, Gravel, and Weave Magazine. Find him online at miketchin.com and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.
