The Body Builder

 

Day 9 of the Flash Fiction Marathon: The prompt-- Your character--a body builder--goes on a blind date. During the course of your story, a warning is ignored.

 

Paul arrived at Grendel’s Den minutes before the deluge. Lucky timing. He’d walked from his gym just outside Harvard Square. It was still before the dinner rush.

 

Only one other person was in the restaurant, and it wasn’t Jennifer. It was his brother Ray. How long had it been since they’d spoken? Two, three years?

 

Paul had not wanted a baby brother. He wanted this brother even less. If he had any hope of having someone to roughhouse with, Ray wasn’t it. When he still believed in the stock delivering babies, he was sure Ray had been dropped at the wrong house.

 

His brother signaled him to join him. Paul went over. He could leave when Jennifer appeared.

“I’m Jennifer,” Ray said. “I figured this was the only way you’d meet with me.”

 

“Probably. Why bother?”

 

“Because I’m leaving Cambridge, Boston. I’ll be interning at John Hopkins starting next month and we are brothers. Brothers should at least talk from time to time.”

 

Paul wondered what they might talk about. He now owned the family gym, which had been his father’s and grandfather’s before him. It wasn’t one of those sissy gyms where women prance around in designer sweats. This was for boxing and martial arts. It was a center for body builders like himself.

Both parents had been body builders. His mother even had won some contests, before working full time at the gym behind the scenes.

 

Despite his disappointment about his now non-existent blind date found on-line, he sat down.

 

“I know I was the white sheep of the family,” Ray said after they had both ordered beers. “I was in the wrong family. Any other and I’d be golden by graduating from Harvard Med.”

 

Paul hadn’t known his brother had finished his degree. He never had understood Ray, who always wanted to read or was off somewhere in his own head. He got top grades where Paul’s were average. 

 

Their parents weren’t that interested in how the kids did in school as long as they didn’t get in trouble.

 

Their father tried to get Ray interested in sports. He harangued him about being too girly. Their mother would defend Ray, but just a little. She would beg him to go outside and throw a ball.

 

When Ray was 13, he suggested he work at the gym, not workout.

 

“Nah,” their father said. “You are too skinny. It would look like we failed.”

 

The brothers hadn’t really fought as they got older. They just didn’t talk. Ray left home when he started Harvard. He would check in every few months, show up for holidays, but was either put down or ignored until he stopped contacting them.

 

The beers arrived. Paul couldn’t think of anything to say. He looked at his watch. He could go back to the gym and do some paperwork and maybe get in another workout. Or he could go get a steak somewhere. Or he could suggest they eat here.

 

“Well?” Ray asked.

 

Paul stood up and put the money for the beers on the table. “I guess you choose your friends, not your family.” It wasn’t that he hated his brother. It was that he was a stranger, a stranger he had no interest in.

 

As he left the rain had slowed to a drizzle.

551 words