Morning Run

Cardio and creative.

There’s a house in our neighborhood I pass every day on my running route. It’s a raised ranch with peeling white paint, jarring hyper-blue trim, and bewilderingly ornate wrought-iron railings. I have never seen anyone going into or coming out of it. There’s a car in the driveway, a small silver Kia, with a flat tire. I know someone lives in the house because the trash gets put out every week and I have seen Uber Eats drivers leave orders at the front door. The vertical-slat blinds are askew and the interior blackout shades drawn. One of the small glass windows in the front door has been missing for years, and in its place molders a sad piece of cardboard.

My creative bent slides underneath that sad cardboard to construct the house’s occupant, a morbidly obese gamer named Nate. Nate’s parents worry about him, of course, and wish he’d find a nice girl because they’d love to be grandparents, and god knows they’re not getting any younger. But they haven’t seen Nate in eight years and have no idea he now weighs 768 pounds. Neither does Nadia, the young Croatian woman he’s talking to online. She thinks he’s an investment banker, six-two and totally shredded. My clients are international bigwigs, he tells Nadia, pains in the asses but they’re flying me down to the Caymans, he says, reaching his fingers into the jumbo bucket of KFC.  Boy, would she be disappointed if she knew who he really was, except she’d have no right to be, because Nadia is actually Ken Bryson, a closeted Republican senator from Utah.

And then I’m home.

People who know I run the same route every day think it sounds boring.

They can’t even begin to imagine.