Wartime in Reverse

by David Gianatasio

Last week at the gym, I turned up the treadmill as fast as it could go. After about an hour, it seemed as if everything around me was standing completely still, and the hands on the clock began to run backwards. Manny C. -- a self-styled personal trainer, though he's really a part-time property manager downtown -- kept shouting things I couldn't understand. Later, I learned he'd been asking "You OK? You OK?" -- but at the time, his words sounded thick and garbled, like battlefield cries: "Incoming! Incoming!" I slipped off the machine and smacked my head against a pile of nutrition manuals stacked in a corner of the room. The scar could be a war wound, but it's not; I think that makes an important point about life or the universe, but I can't quite figure out what it is.

6S

David Gianatasio's first book of fiction and commentary, Swift Kicks, was published last year by So New Publishing. He's the author of 6 Sentences.