…where no Brian has gone before.

—————————————-

Standing up.

Silent, still.

All I have now, in this moment, is a feeling. I feel…

Strong.

Not strong as in powerful, but rather as being stable. My body feels lean and strong. It’s such an unfamiliar sensation, like I have suddenly donned a new body. Unlike any other. Alien even. As if my consciousness has ben transferred. Removed from the fat, pudgy thing my mind’s eye has been seeing all these years, and placed into a sleek, athletic and toned alien body. Something out of a science fiction story.

Cool!

I look down at Bruce lying unconscious on the floor. Stacy and Clark are crying, confused and scared. At first, I hear nothing. As if I’ve gone deaf. Then slowly the sounds begin to match the scene before me. Bruce is still out cold and I start to worry.

“Is he dead?” I say to myself. “I wonder what happened?”

These questions and others like it, come to me without emotion. As If I’m completely detached. Uninvolved. But of course I am involved. I’m more than involved, I’m the cause of all this.

Or am I?

I start to recall the sequence of events leading up to this moment.

All of them.

—————

How Stacy had stood up to me and my lame attempt to trick her into not watching Love American Style. And how she’d doubled down on her defiance to my having played the “I’m much bigger and stronger than you” card. When I took the TV knob she knew she couldn’t get it away from me so she employed a new trick I’d not yet seen. She went and got a pair of pliers from the kitchen tool drawer and turned it back to channel four.

Silly girl.

Of course I simply took the pliers from her and changed it back to channel six. We were going to watch Hogan’s Heroes which came on right after Gilligan’s Island on channel six. Nothing she could do would stop that. Except…

I’d settled back, satisfied with my small victory. Bruce had kept out of it. He’d pretended to read his book the whole time until…

Stacy made her final statement. She wasn’t going to just let it go so easily. Stacy was a fighter. I knew she’d never intended it, and she knew she wasn’t going to get her way, but when she came up from behind and smacked me in the face with the sofa pillow, she broke my glasses.

My glasses!

————–

Now my recollections of all that led up to this moment go back a bit farther. To seemingly less significant occasions in which my glasses ended up getting broken.

To be continued…