Sixteen Minutes

By Mr. Silverson

Grady spent every single morning of the twenty-second year of his life taking sixteen minutes to complete his “8 Minute Abs” and “8 Minute Buns” videotapes back-to-back without a break. As he began his sit-ups every morning, his heart still racing from the surprise of the alarm clock, the odd details of the night’s dreams would linger in his memory: a dog that could talk, a witch, the back of an old girlfriend’s head, whatever it was, it would be gone by the time Grady had moved on to bicycle crunches.

Except one, which came in the third month.

He lies on an operating table, his body frozen with anesthesia. A doctor appears in his view, with a surgeon’s mask and a great explosion of Bozo red hair and injects him with a clear solution into his stomach and buttocks. With his eyes only, as his neck is stiff, he tries to look down at his torso. There is something growing beneath the skin, moving.

In his waking life, Grady’s body was changing as well. Bulges of muscle began to appear through the flab of his gut and his rear end looked fantastic. And he kept dreaming the dream, the colors vivid in his mind as fresh paint as he lunged in time and sweated during the dark mornings.

“Foolish,” he thought to himself as he prodded suspiciously into his abdomen while waiting for his bread to toast. “Foolish,” he thought again later, poking his new butt muscles while in line at the supermarket. The next day it took him an hour to work up the courage to insert the videotape into the VCR.

On the morning of his twenty-third birthday, Grady woke up, devoured a piece of chocolate cake and never worked out again.