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five-seven, five inches shorter than me. “You need to be closer.” Clearly she had never hit anyone before.
    She moved in another six inches. We were standing almost belly to belly.
    “Now, in slow motion, throw the punch.” As her fist neared my nose I said, “Freeze there.” She stopped with her arm fully extended, at an upward angle of about forty degrees. I turned to the rest of the class. “She has to hit up as well as out, which reduces both power and accuracy. A fist strike to the nose of a standing opponent is not efficient when they’re taller than you.”
    “What about his chin?” Jennifer said.
    “Nearly as high up, and very hard on the knuckles. Never hit bone with bone unless you have to.” How did people survive long enough to reach adulthood without knowing these things?
    “So knock him to his knees, then hit him,” Nina said, looking around for laughs.
    “Fine. But how? Suze, you can put your arm down.”
    “Solar plexus,” Therese said. Not gut or belly but solar plexus. Lots of time with a massage therapist, personal trainer, or individual yoga instruction.
    “Good. Come out here and show me. Slow motion, like Suze.” She threw a slow, tidy punch targeted one inch below my xiphoid process. “Freeze it there.” I turned to the rest of the class. “See how she’s thrown the punch beyond the skin so that the fist would end up buried to the wrist? Assuming your assailant doesn’t have abs of steel, that would put them down for at least a minute.”
    “One minute?” Pauletta said. “You mean like sixty seconds? That’s it?”
    “Kick him in the nuts,” Tonya said, then blushed. Half the class hooted.
    “Tonya’s on the right track. If you want a downed opponent to stay down, a kick’s probably the best choice. All right, a volunteer to pretend to be the attacker Therese has just put on the ground and Tonya’s about to kick to death.”
    I wasn’t a bit surprised when Tonya looked at Katherine, who stepped forward. Always easier to kick the one you know, however slightly.
    “On the floor. Curl up as though you’ve just been hit in the stomach— no, tighter. Where would your hands be? Right, curled around yourself. Now, think: you can’t breathe, so what would you be trying to do?” She struggled in mock weakness to sit up. “Good.” And it was. In my rookie police classes, the women had always been better at role-playing than the men. I made another mental note, to exploit that. “Good,” I said again. “Okay. Stay like that.” I turned to Tonya. “What could you kick?”
    Tonya circled the reclining figure dubiously.
    “Huh,” Pauletta said, “she’s sitting on her balls.”
    A few sniggers at that. “Tonya?”
    More circling.
    Suze couldn’t stand it anymore. “In the face, right in the fucking face!”
    “That would work,” I said. Tonya was no more likely to be able to kick a person in the face than punch them. “Anything else?”
    “Lower ribs,” Therese said.
    “Good, yes. The floating ribs are easily detached, from front, back or side. Anything else?”
    “His spine,” Nina said unexpectedly. “Circle round and get his spine.”
    “Or the back of his head,” Kim added.
    “Or you could try a combination of spine and head: kick the place where the back of the neck meets the skull.”
    Tonya liked that idea much better: he wouldn’t be watching her kick him. She stopped behind Katherine and took a deep breath.
    “Slow motion,” I reminded her.
    She tried. She would have missed by a couple of inches, she nearly fell over, and she blushed afterwards, but that didn’t matter: she did it, and she didn’t giggle.
    “You can get up now,” I said to Katherine. In the next class I’d show them how to break someone’s spine even with bare feet, but right now I didn’t want them getting locked into one type of body weapon. Beginnings are delicate times. “Now we’ll move on to the fingertip.”
    “Pretty anticlimactic,” Nina