Martyn meets Bolt

A sigh rose up from his bed, and, since he was not able to turn around, or even as much as stir any of his limbs without any pain, Martyn rolled his eyes to the ceiling. His body felt like painful slush everytime he moved. Last night, before going out, he had written into his notebook: "These days I have the feeling life is punching me in the face continuously. It used to dunk my head in the toilet every day, now it's only throwing punches. Things have gotten better, right?"
Little did he know that later that night he was to be punched in the face quite literally. This whole story had not contributed to lift his spirits, needless to say.
The evening had been a rather quiet, but nice night out, in a bar round Kitay Gorod, seeing a band. By the time they had decided to go home, it was gone half past two, so there was no metro service anymore. Lena was going to let him crash on her couch that night.
To enter the house you had to pass a glass door. That uncomfortable moment when you didn't really know what to say anymore, but knew you should find something, had long come and gone. Both had partied hard the night before and tiredness had had the upper hand that evening. Lena had a problem getting the key for her apartment out of her pocket, and held the downstairs door open with her left hand splayed onto its surface, while her other hand fiddled around in her pocket. Martyn walked forward into the disorientation of the complete darkness that shrouded the staircase. Just a second of this uncertainness had passed as his surroundings alit with a flash, and it was not Lena pressing down the staircase clock timer. Someone whose eyes had been better accustomed to the dark had walked up to him and hit him right into his face. While Lena scrambled to make some light, Martyn felt he was choking as his airways were being cut off by the same person grabbing him by the collar and pushing him violently up to the wall. Martyn could feel the adrenaline rush through his temples, and he hastily tried to cover his face and stomach with his arms and elbows as punch after punch rained down on him. By the force of the blows he would not have guessed this was a girl. Someone must have taught her how to punch. Later on he found out it was a known fact she was into lifting weights and so on. That moment right there he could feel all that in the swing of her fist. She did her job without so much as sweating a drop, using his face as a living punchbag, going to work quite business-like, forming some sort of bloody, mushy sculpture out of it. Not even taking a look to appraise her work, she finally made off out onto the street, leaving Martyn and Lena to put the clock timer back on as it cloaked them in blackness. It had all been over in less than two minutes. Lena looked at Martyn, trying to shake the blank stare of disbelief from her face, then rummaged in her pocket to find a tissue and wipe the blood of his cheek. "That was my ex", she said, almost apologetically, "I crossed her once before in the staircase, but I did not know she came to hang out here regularly at night. I had not realized what she was up to." Martyn had slumped to the ground, leaning against the wall. Lena held out a hand and helped him to get up with the words, "Let's put some ice on your face". They started the slog up the stairs under the clinical white light of the glaring, glabrous light bulb sticking out without lampshades from the tiled wall. Martyn felt nauseous from the punches in the belly, and he felt like his knees should be shaking, although they weren't. When they were inside Lena's apartment, he lay down to sleep with a bag of ice gingerly posed on his cheek. He felt like his cheekbone might have been brayed to dust, and under his fingertips he could sense the swelling. Maybe it was fractured. In the night he felt the heat swell his skin, bloating the features of his face into puffy distortion and the next day he would even have bruises on his back from being pushed onto the wall.