Flash Fiction - Slow
By Casey Douglass
Spinkel had always been
slow. Not slow in a dimwitted kind of way, but slow in both movement
and speech. His friend Rami often joked that Spinkel lived life at
half-speed. Spinkel felt this was an exaggeration, as he knew he
would have to do his version of “running” to even approach
“half-speed”.
The doctors were
stumped as to whether his condition was mental or physical, or both.
After years of tests, pumping him with caffeine, stimulants and
courses of cognitive behavioural therapy, they did what any caring
doctor would do. They washed their hands of him.
As far as Spinkel’s
job prospects, they shouldn't have been zero, but they were. He’d
achieved good grades at college and shown himself to be a friendly,
sociable chap. Employers however, wouldn’t touch him. Job after job
passed him by. The Job Centre tried to help. They had the bright idea
of having Spinkel re-classified as a robot. It didn’t work. They
penalized Spinkel for their own failings. He told them to go fuck
themselves. Slowly, of course. With diagrams and everything.
On a darkening evening,
Spinkel found himself on the roof of the local multi-story car park.
He considered jumping. He idly wondered if he would fall at a slow,
ponderous rate. It was as he ruminated on this that he spied a
gathering in a back garden on the other side of the street. His heart
hit a heady forty five beats per minute as his breath began to catch
in his throat. He saw a group of people, and they were slow too!
As it turned out, they
were full-speed people, but people behaving in a deliberately slow
fashion. After his chat with the leader, he bought a book on Tai-Chi
and other meditative movement-based disciplines. He wondered if he’d
found his niche in the world. He studied hard and became a teacher,
running his classes at the local town hall and amassing such a
following that he soon had to expand his operation. He brought his
innate slowness to the postures and movements he performed, something
even the best ‘normal’ instructors could only dream of.
Spinkel fell
in love with a frazzled woman who’d worked herself into a nervous
breakdown. Together, they found that his tempo and her over-drive
blended perfectly into the bosom of their intimate relationship.
They had two slow children, were adopted by a moderately-paced cat,
and lived out their days in a quiet cottage, packing every second of
every day with only as much as it could comfortably carry.
THE END
