USA Fencing has signed a two-year deal with Togethxr as its official media partner through the 2028 L.A. Games 🤺 The partnership will feature documentary-style content, behind-the-scenes features and social storytelling aimed at introducing fencing to new audiences. MORE:

USA. A church lunch. Megan put a heavy glass dish in my hands. On the rim, a strip of tape. My name, in marker, the way a soldier is labeled before a river crossing. “You bring it back,” she said. “Empty is fine. Missing is a crime.” I carried the dish like a relic. People praised a yellow food I did not cook. I bowed each time, which made the dish more famous than it deserved. Three days later the empty dish was on my porch. There was a note. YOUR TURN. I sat with the note until the sun moved. In my country a returned bowl is the end of a kindness. Here a returned bowl is a loaded weapon. Someone must fill it. I called Megan. “What do I make?” “Whatever,” she said. “If it sloshes, put foil on it. If it sloshes after the foil, you are family.” I made too much. This also seemed to be the law. I wrote my name on fresh tape, larger, in case the dish got lost and needed to find its way home like a horse. At the next lunch a woman I did not know said, “You’re the casserole guy.” I had been renamed again. I accepted it. The dish had done the introducing. So tell me, America. When you send a man his own empty armor and write YOUR TURN — is that hospitality, or conscription? And the tape with the name. Is it so the glass comes home, or so the person cannot hide? Your turn.

USA. A living room. There was a sword on my friend Brad’s wall. It was not my sword. It was a catalog sword. Black stand. Gold letters I would not read aloud. “Check it out,” Brad said, and he drew it. In my country you do not draw without a reason. The room changes. The air takes a side. A drawn blade is a sentence that has already started. I stepped back. My hand found the empty place where a hilt was not. Brad froze. “Whoa. Dude. It’s not even sharp.” He turned the edge toward the lamp. The metal was honest about its dullness. That did not return the air to what it had been. “I am sorry,” I said, though he was the one who had drawn. “The body does not ask the blade if it is real.” Brad slid it home very carefully, the way a man puts a sleeping child down. “My bad. I thought it was just cool.” It is cool. That is the danger. We sat. The sword returned to being furniture. The room forgave us at different speeds. So tell me, America. When you hang a sword where a painting could go, and you pull it out to show a guest — what are you showing? The steel, or the fact that you can put it back? And if it is not sharp, why did both of us become quieter anyway? Put it back.