The Man with no Muscles

I do not use a single muscle in my body. Suffering from hypersensitivity, everything makes me upset, my heart pounds when I see a commercial that indicates the slightest trace of human emotion. Before my father would let in to me, he told me this was called the weak disease. The only way to end it, was to force it out, with fists, belts, suspenders, baseball bats, cheap beer bottles, and once my mother's shoe. My mother had the weak disease too. Every night while I suffered from my affliction, My father, the self proclaimed medicine man, would pummel her till her cries became as silent as the day the door closed and my mother disappeared forever. 

My mother must have been rehabilitated. I had to stay, until my father told me it was okay. Red liquid, the toxins of my body would pour from every orifice as he left me to sit in the living room. After all, even doctors need their rest. Psychotherapy was also important. I had mantras to live by:

I am pathetic. I am a weak minded. I deserve everything that happens to me. How can I be strong? How can I be better? I will change. I will change.

I needed to be bigger. The local swimming pool was usually off limits, but submission, I was slowly learning was unacceptable. I jumped in the pool. I thrashed my body, how could my soft bones and peach weak skin move from one side to the other. Once before this, I had been in water, an ocean filled with needles, people and their friends laughing at me, as I swallowed brackish water, pretending not to notice that I was sobbing, waiting for someone to help me. No one did, for they knew to touch the untouchable will be a gravely ill mistake. I wandered around exhausted until wrapping my arms around the pole of an abandoned harbor, looking at metal and steel. The ocean butterfly out of the chrysalis and into a hot hurting city of immeasurable pain.

I have six lanes to my lonesome. I pulse and swim, a new part of me awakens, and the kaleidoscope of colors are bursting at me. Sucking the water, the bromine fills out until my lungs are soggy. I drain the pool and hold the water, a massive tank of urine, bacteria killing, and lost goggles. Heaving and sagging down the streets, an orb, the boy with no muscles, the child with no heart, the beat that sags to silence. He waits for me in his chair. The weak disease is gone, instead of beating it out of me, I fill it up in one balloon and wait for it to pop. His eyes cannot mask the surprise he has for me, the maw of being victim and victor. Spilling his warm beer he stifles back and prepares, but nothing can prepare anyone for a flood. No higher ground, we live on the top floor. 

Spewing forth, my teeth rip from my guns, The water that has mixed with my stomach acids fly in his directions pushing his back against the wall. Sacrum, Lumbar, Thoracic, Cervical, all slowly being pulled North, South, East, and West. His eyes bulge and he is torn limb from limb. When it is all over, I go into my room. Soaking wet and cold. Shivering I find the beautiful cardboard wings my mother gave me as a child. If she has gone anywhere, I know it is up, into a sky where things are better, where love exists an I won't cry anymore.

On the roof, I hear noises, that ever present heat begin to itch at my skin, perhaps a relapse? Perhaps not. I walk to the edge and I fly so high, but first I must swim. The girt, the water, but finally I use my muscles. It hurts but I am not weak anymore.