Amentigie kanu, Spain's National Honour
October 2026
0 For 10
18/10/26
Ramon Duart Valencia - 0 for 10
Dreams take flight, they said. So I gathered my hopes under a dying sky — small change in a sweating fist, kept for no one. The light went down like a coin in a well they told me was a dream.
The ball is alone out here. It bounces. Bounce. Bounce. A pulse the ward keeps taking back. Each slap on the boards a whisper of the unfulfilled — a wish I never buried with the proper rite.
The lines come crisp, white, sanitary as hospital sheets. They drew a cage and named it court. Whitewashed, it is still a cage. My passion curdles; my resentment brews like something left too long in a warm room.
I call this isolation practice. I call this burning skill. The missed shot stings — a long cold needle the dark keeps threading, threading.
Whilst The others rise. The net hangs mute, a witness who does not care, a white-eyed nothing. Rejection takes me as a lover — cold-fingered, thorough — and the tears come, the small salt insolence of them. I, the overlooked. I, the litter-cart. I, the off-cast.
My sneakers go quiet. My name goes quiet on the floor. And here is the challenger, smiling, and his smile is a mirror.
Ten times I fling it. Ten times it refuses the mouth of the hoop. The master teacher, they call it. I call it the throat that chews and chews and never, never swallows.
But watch — out of this cold gym floor, out of the dropped arc, count me risen. I have died this small death ten times; I can count it. It is the only arithmetic I am fluent in.
I am learning the grammar of the long body. learning to throw with my whole life in the wrist. The rival is famous. So am I. Out of the missed shot I rise — red ball, red hands.
By Amentigie
Score: 77.72 out of 100.
Read the October 2026 National Honours