Lori Hoeck

This is one of the fictional stories I wrote for Think Like a Black Belt, Take Charge of Your Own Safety – my e-book on self defense for everyone.

Meg vs. the Giant

Meg’s cheerleading practice had been over for an hour, but her brother still hadn’t arrived to pick her up.

“Jerk” she said to herself, “probably sucking face with that girlfriend of his…”

Meg was the only one left on the school’s darkening football field. She quickly realized she couldn’t Avoid the Vulnerability Factor, so she remained in code yellow as her parents and that book by the female black belt taught her. She wanted to call her brother, but her battery was dead from too much texting.

Moving toward the parking lot, Meg witnessed a car approaching her slowly. Observing her exits strategies, she paused a moment to see if she recognized the driver. It was one of the football players, a huge linebacker named Vince.

The huge teenager drove up close, smiled, and offered her a ride.

Meg declined.

Not put off, Vince spread an even more charming smile. “Why don’t I stick around to keep you safe from the bad guys?”

Meg was torn between knowing the guy and understanding that most rapes are acquaintance rapes. In her moment of slight indecision, he hopped out of his vehicle, sidled up closer and joked about her jumpiness. He kept eyeing the road into the parking lot as if scouting for anyone who might see.

He started to get too close, and she Set a Boundary: “Vince, I don’t feel comfortable with you here,” she said. “Leave now.”

Vince laughed mockingly.

With strong body language, she said, “Vince, back off. Get in your car and go home.”

She saw the flicker of a controlling, wicked leer cross his face. Grabbing her wrist with a cruel grip, his leer turned into a wolfish smile. “Looks like I need to teach Pretty Girl here a few niceness lessons.”

Fear started to swallow Meg with the realization that he must weigh 280 pounds.

Meg then realized the Media and Movie Myths aren’t always true and Vince must surely have some vulnerable spots.

She Chose to Fight instead of Comply and faked a knee shot to the groin, knowing he would probably block with a thigh. As soon as he did, she brought an arcing elbow down on his nose, shattering cartilage against facial bone. Vince let go in agony, holding his nose.

Meg figured the pain wouldn’t last long on such a big football player and decided to Toss Out Niceness and Rules. Knowing a few pounds of pressure can break smaller bones, she raised her knee high and stomped downward with her heel into his left foot.

As his body arched forward from the pain in his foot, Meg brought her knee up into his face. With Vince’s body suddenly brought upright again, Meg finished him off with a final kick to the now fully vulnerable groin.

As Vince collapsed into a pile of dust and defeat, Meg’s jerk brother pulled into the parking lot with disbelief etched into his face…..

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For information on self defense visit my site on physical, mental and emotional self defense:  Think Like a Black Belt.

Thank you for visiting,
Lori Hoeck

Photo Credit: litelover

“I’m sure you don’t want to do that,” he said. “It really wouldn’t be helpful to the company.”

The parental tone rang subtle, but commanding, from a superior to a subordinate. But this time the fatherly smile he put on his face like makeup didn’t ring as true.

Damn, she thought, this was going to be a long discussion.

Well, not discussion. He rarely let others listen or get a word in edgewise.

As her immediate boss in the company’s marketing department, he was automatically dealt the better and upper hand, and damn if he didn’t know how to use it to his best advantage.

She knew it would fall on deaf ears, but she had to say it anyway. “Actually I was trying to help the company with this new online idea.”

“Sarah,” he always used her name when he felt threatened and insecure, “you know what I’ve said about this. I love that you have enthusiasm and want to help, but I’ve been down this road before, and it never works.”

With hardly a pause he continued, “When I first joined this company, I took pride in how it stood on solid standards and ideas. We’ve never wavered from those. To do something new just to do something new is not good business.”

“But I’ve seen this work elsewhere with great success. I read an article in the main trade magazine that backs up how well it can help us.”

“Have I ever steered you wrong, Sarah?”

There it was — his switch-up in the conversation to avoid having to listen to her defend her ideas.

And what other reply did she have for the person who approved her paycheck? With the smallest of sighs, she bit off the word, “No.”

“Well then, you know I mean what I say when I’ve tried things like this before. When I first headed up sales, a man by the name of Jack Johnson came up with something similar …”

At that point her nods came diligently, but her mind ran long and hard from this twice-heard story he used to prove to the world why “things are they way they are and are going to stay that way.”

Each of his hand gestures and well-rehearsed emotional stage play weighted down her heart and shoulders. Why did I stick around for more of this? I left home years ago. I don’t need a Daddy-figure or school principal to keep make me feel like I don’t measure up so I keep trying harder to please.

Her self-loathing jumped a notch, but never bubbled up to her face. She’d learned a long time ago to peer through well-made masks. Otherwise, the conversations grew longer.

Somewhere inside her, as the drone of words played on, a sharp blade cut into her, slicing something old and moldy from her mind. The once quiet and dead-still inner sea moved as if whipped by a strong wind. Waves slowly rolled higher and higher as long-held indignation roared across the seascape.

With a new clarity crashing against the shore of her selfhood, she naturally sat up taller in her chair. The new body language commanded notice.

Sarah heard his words trail off as he noticed the change. His kind spent a lifetime controlling the small and large things of power.

She now she noticed them, too.

Leaping into the gap between the torrents of words, she said, “I understand your vast experience with this company carries a lot of weight for you, but I see stories like these as unhelpful. I value quality, standards, and making this company great, too, and those things don’t disappear when innovation and new ideas are tried.”

Before he could summon another gush of words, she plodded on.

“There is no harm in my suggestion. I’m the one taking the responsibility here. I’m willing to try it and if it fails, then I’m the one who fails. I’m not cowed by other people’s past attempts. Sure maybe they did fail, but maybe they just didn’t have the abilities I do. I own my successes and my failures, and I won’t let Jack’s story be a gravestone to innovation or to my creativity.”

Standing up, she added, “If you want to back me on my idea, fine. If not, there’s nothing more to say.”

Turning to leave, a power and a freedom raced through her body, a feeling that had eluded her a long time. Smiling broadly, she realized no one would take a parental role over her again.

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For information on emotional self defense and how to deal with such controlling parental figures, visit my other website, Think Like a Black Belt — especially this short article: “Defense Against the Dark Hearts.”

Thank you for visiting,
Lori Hoeck

Dust floated, blew, or blasted into the house, depending on the wind strength. It filled the air with a choking dryness, a desert in every breath.

After fifteen years of high plains living, Margie longed every spring for the little green that would fill the sparse trees and wild grasses. Her friends in the city sighed at her lack of lawn or flowers, but her small well could never be allowed to run dry.

No, the water could never be wasted on a lawn or a rose garden. The few farm animals and chickens needed it, as did her vegetable garden.

She’d learned the ways of scarcity from her grandparents, who’d owned the farm for years. Grandma and Grandpa took her in after her own parents had died in a car wreck when she was ten. Now they’d both passed on within a year of each other, leaving Margie the farm.

Life on the harsh, wind-swept plains meant “doin’ without” and Margie had learned her lessons well.

“Waste not; want not,” Grandma always said.

“Fancy things are for fancy-pants people who don’t know nuthin’ but how to spend money,” Grandpa said whenever she wanted something new.

Taking these words to heart instead of as advice, Margie shied away from fancy things all her life: going to college, accepting a marriage proposal from a wealthy land owner, and her dream of becoming a writer in the big city.

One early summer day, as Margie dutifully dusted the house, she noticed a difference in the wind, the kind of thing a farmer notices, because so much rides on the weather. Walking outside to the porch, she looked to the west and saw a huge thunderhead building in the sky.

From years of watching storms come and go, she knew this one was a freight train headed straight at the farm. Keeping a wary eye on the storm, she shooed the chickens back into their pen, covered her still small tomato plants with buckets to prevent hail damage, and put the car in the old shed for the same reason.

In the house, she visited the storage closet to pull out emergency candles and the extra flashlights and batteries too see if they were all set to go, just in case the electricity went out.

Back outside, she looked up and gasped. Never before had she seen a storm’s cloud wall so menacing and swift or the color so green, the latter a sure sign of hail.

As she watched mesmerized, a small white cloud spun itself into a downward pointing arrow that stretched quickly toward the ground. Rising from the ground to meet it came the dust. They met fifty feet in the air and formed a now dark, twisting, writhing funnel of death headed straight for her.

Her feet would not move. Planted in the dust, she remained awed at the raw power in front of her. The tornado’s thousand-demon roar filled her ears and heart with a surge her scarcity-driven life had never known.

Before the swirling debris field hit, she dropped to her knees.  Without thinking, she raised her hands at the same time. Not in prayer, not in surrender, but in an embrace.

In that moment, the funnel danced up and over her, carrying its ripping and tearing winds a few yards away, where the tornado once again tore open the earth with its fury.

Margie jumped up and turned to follow the destroyer with her eyes. She lost view of it as the storm let loose with ice-cold rain. Fortunately for her and the farm, the hail would wait and drop a mile east.

Drenched, Margie walked to the farmhouse. Just inside the door, she paused. Something odd tickled at her mind. It took her a full minute to realize the house was somehow smaller and less of a home than a house. In the next few hours, as the storm raged with lightning and rain, the house began to feel like a sweater two sizes too small, the collar gripping the neck uncomfortably.

Finally the clouds broke and the setting sun lit up the back of the departing storm. Margie decided to put away her extra flashlights and candles, glad the electricity still worked. As she opened the storage closet and placed them on a shelf, her elbow knocked a box to the floor. Picking the box up, she noticed they contained her notebooks from high school, including her once much-treasured writing journal. As she put the box back in place, she grabbed the journal, blew off the dust, and took it back to the kitchen table.

With the smell of fresh rain still filling the air, she found a pen, pulled up a seat, and let the words flow.

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I grew up in the Tornado Alley area of the country in Oklahoma. Storms still fascinate me, and I would be a storm chaser running down tornadoes with a camera if I could.

Thank you for visiting,
Lori Hoeck

Coffee in hand, she watched the morning clouds first glow pink, then slowly fill the sky with a canopy of fire.

“Red sky at night, sailors’ delight; Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.” The old timers’ saying made her wonder, did the sky know her heart?

Even with the warmth of strong coffee, she shivered, but not from the cold. The handgun on the kitchen table lay ready. She hoped she was as well.

Her friends all said she had choices, but from her viewpoint there was only one. He’d already made it clear he would never let go, never stop looking, never give her up. She’d lived through enough blood, bruises, and broken bones to know what he could do.

It was time to put a stop to it all.

Down the hallway, she heard their son stir in his bed. His birthday was next month, “The Big Fife,” as the boy called it.

At least this birthday wouldn’t include a trip to the hospital with the smell of cake and blood mixed together.

Visions of that day burned resolve into her soul. She carefully set down her coffee and picked up the weapon. It felt right in her hand, heavy and durable.

Then she heard it. The motor of his pick-up truck coming down the road, gears down shifting to make the turn into the driveway.

I will enjoy selling that truck, she thought, if only to never feel the fearful anticipation again.

She heard the door open on his truck but not shut.

He must be drunk. Again.

Then she heard the front door burst open with a kick, followed by the sound of a shotgun being cocked.

As he made his way through the house and toward the kitchen, he crowed triumphantly,  mockingly, “Honey, I’m home!”

Her jaw clenched. Not for long.
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As an EMT who has responded to more than one domestic violence scene,  I don’t advocate this response, but I can understand it.

Thank you for visiting,
Lori Hoeck