Greg, all two hundred and twenty pounds of him, came off the earth. He flipped over my hip and slammed onto the mat with a force that emptied his lungs in a wet whuff.

I went down with him and kept the choke, locking my legs around his torso and hooking my ankles.

The backyard was dead silent, save for the sizzling of the burgers.

Greg thrashed. He was strong, panicked, bucking like a wild horse. But technique overpowers strength. I tightened the vise.

“Stop fighting,” I said into his ear. It wasn’t a request.

His face went red, then purple. His free hand clawed uselessly at my forearm. His eyes bulged with primal, suffocating terror — the specific terror of a man discovering, at forty-one, that everything he believed about himself was decoration.