Hey All, guess who’s back! I’ve been busy with many things, and so am only now publishing another short story. The bad news is that I will not regularly post for about a month. The good news is that in March, I will begin posting regularly again! As usual comments welcome!
Perhaps rules are made to be broken, thought Johnson as he lifted the dumb bell and lowered it again. He considered that such a thought betrayed the ideals he long considered ideal. Perhaps to admit the simple truth that he would never keep his new year’s resolutions made him a lesser man. But perhaps the only difference between himself and a lesser man was that he now considered himself a lesser man. It goes nowhere, he thought as he lifted the dumb bell and lowered it again.
Johnson watched his biceps in the mirror. He watched them swell and relax under a hefty layer of fat. This fat coated his body. He felt it cling to him like wet clothing. On the treadmill, it whipped about him, tossed by the momentum of running, churning under his skin like waves against the shore. When he sat, it pooled into puddles around his skeleton, and folded his skin onto itself, creating deep grooves from which sprang trickles of sweat. This last New Year’s Eve, he lost a pencil in one such groove. He could not see over the folds of his skin, so he stood, but since that did not avail him, he looked in a mirror to finally find the pencil caught in a loose thread under his left arm.
He resolved to burn the fat away. Each year brought resolutions. Johnson considered it admirable to have resolutions. He even enjoyed the word resolution. The sound of it was like a boom in his brain. But the truth was that Johnson rarely kept them. One year he resolved to read a book every month, and spent weeks scouring the internet for the best of the best books, the books that all masters of literature agreed were masterpieces, books that would expand his mind and soul in ways hardly imaginable. Johnson knew it would be hard, that most of these books would probably be dense and difficult to read, but at the end of this crucible he would have burned away the—well, the fat that sloshed about his brain—and become a wise person.
Johnson read the first page of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and fell asleep. But he had never lost hope. It seemed to Johnson that perhaps he was just not a wise person, or wisdom was not within his grasp. Perhaps not all people could be wise. So this year, he decided to set his sights lower. Anyone could be thin, even if for only a short while. What mattered was will, and will could be mustered, whereas wisdom was gained. Will came from the deep recesses of the soul. Greater minds bestowed wisdom. Everyone, even the lowest of the lesser men, had will.
But as Johnson lifted and lowered the dumbbell for the tenth time, he felt perhaps a small waist size was indeed beyond his powers to achieve. Fatigue swelled under his skin like the rising of the tide, and no will silenced it’s growing demand for rest. Perhaps not everyone could be thin, perhaps he could not muster the necessary will. Perhaps the world did not function as he thought it did. Perhaps rules are made to be broken.
Johnson set down the dumbbell, then sat upon a bench. Still looking in the mirror, he watched a bead of sweat swell along his hairline and then slide down his forehead and over his eyebrow, growing in size as it joined with other beads, until it disappeared into the fold of skin just above his open eye. He blinked, and the bead of sweat, now released from the groove, slid over his closed eye and onto his eyelash, where it soaked into the slit of his eyelids, and mixed with the moisture of his eye. The salt of his sweat mixed with the moisture of his eye, and it burned. He blinked until the salt diluted and the burning went away.
freestories.wordpress.com 