Flash Fiction

Living Longer


A long time ago, or a short time ago, a young man without sufficient direction found out that exercise, especially lower-body exercise can extend life. Well, in many young men, life-extending knowledge is a cause for boasting. There is nothing that young men want more than to outrun and outlast those around them. To him, outlasting everyone was the best way to outsmart them. He thought that if he lived the way others wanted to-if he ran for many miles per day, if he played multiple endurance sports, and if he strength-trained as if he were planning to be trapped under a razed building, that he was living far more intelligently than anyone he knew. So for the next ten years, people leaving stores and walking their dogs commented to each other that they should be jogging the way he was. People who played basketball, tennis and soccer against him always conceded to the idea that no one trained as hard as he did, and those who lost to him did so with the awkward smile one always has when their opponent cares more. The most beautiful women he met were attracted to him, and he went on dates where women spoke about nothing but his looks, his biceps and trapezius muscles. He searched for other things to speak about, but conversations in restaurants went from food and nutrition, to how food effects the body. There was nothing else. He saw exercise differently from those who exercised for a living. A woman who overlooked the fact that he'd never lost his youthful and obnoxious boasting about living longer, and who thought he was the most beautiful and inspirational man she'd ever come into contact with, had his child, and all he could think of as he ran and lifted and pressed during her pregnancy was how he could teach his son to learn to live as he did much earlier in life. The woman had a daughter. It took three years for her to realize that his obsession with exercise and himself were nothing special, and she moved five states away. After that, his looks seemed to matter less to women, and he generally saw men with pot-bellies walking around with families and wives. Men with money had the even prettier wives. He was alone. Alone in exercise and alone in the clanging of weights and the calculation of breaths. One day when his hair was beginning to turn gray, a message came from his daughter that the woman who had his child had died of cancer. His daughter died in an automobile accident fifteen years later and someone who had access to her address book sent him an invitation to the funeral. On both occasions he did sit-ups until the creases in his abdomen bled, and he could not leave his home, but he quietly never let go of the idea that sadly, he really had outlasted everyone. He continued to exercise, even after it was understood that he would live far longer than anyone he'd ever even knew, he continued to exercise. He was an old man who was known to be crazy-crazy in the park and crazy in his basement and too obsessed with living longer to be around anyone. So no one was around when his arms gave and those weights fell on his head. He was hurt badly when he made it to the street, and when he fell asleep in the ambulance, it was into a three-month coma. He awoke fifty pounds heavier, and after taking one look at his body, and trying his best to move it to exercise right away without any success, he began to cry, and when his crying ended, he was dead.