The Basement

Flash Fiction.

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.

But you have a tendency, especially lately, to surprise yourself.

It’s damn near four, a couple hours still till sunrise, and Dad is telling you to bust out just one more rep — trying to be encouraging — but a distracting thought has just popped into your head to get in the way of the workout.

That thought: You just kind of know things aren’t going all that well when you’re fighting off incessant insomnia with your old man at his house by grinding out some sort of butterfly exercise to blast your pecs before any rational human being would have even woken up to begin their day.

But here you are and it seems that here you shall remain for the foreseeable future. (Not, like, specifically in a Bowflex-centric Purgatory, but spending most of your waking hours in your father’s basement.)

Until you get your shit in some semblance of order, anyway — something you have been purposely (if mostly failingly) not giving a lot of thought to, due to the degree of difficulty.

You’re not thrilled about entering some kind of stasis, gathering inertia from a fold-out couch with a soft mattress, firmly establishing residency, but at the same time you find yourself craving a little bit of latent stability in a life that so suddenly began to lack as much.