Weekend Write-In Story Collection

Charles At Last?

In 500 words, imagine what happens when a ghost makes life just a smidge more difficult. Written for the Weekend Write-In prompt themed "Ecto". 23 - 25 October 2015

To some, bulky muscles come naturally, to others they never come.

Slim Bill

For as long as I can remember, Bill, my friend up the street had been thin. Not just thin, but skinny, even scrawny. The meaner kids called him names, like broomstick and beanpole. He tried everything to add muscles, to bulk-up, but nothing worked. His flexed biceps were the same diameter as my wrists, my limp biceps were the size of his thighs. He couldn't believe I had no exercise routine except delivering papers; he wore himself to a frazzle with his routines.

I remember him drooling over the Charles Atlas ads in comic books. He finally sent off for the free book with no obligation. "It's arrived!" he said, gasping with excitement as he waved the booklet in the air and dumped the remainder of the mail onto the porch. We sat there on the step as he ripped open the envelope and stared at the booklet cover, then paged through it, oohing at the pictures of bulging muscles. "Look at this, isn't this exciting." I looked over his shoulder as he continued flipping through. Besides many pictures of bulky muscles, the main thing I kept seeing was the frequently repeated phrase: Only Fifteen Minutes a Day. Accompanying this was his repeatedly saying: "This won't take long."

My thoughts on the booklet were left unsaid, but they were along the lines of: This is nothing but a thirty-two-page ad. I left him there on the porch with his mail and continued my way home from school, then carried on to the newspaper office to pick up my bundles of the afternoon paper to deliver.

The next morning, after I had delivered the Times on my way to school, Bill ran up to me all excited. "I dropped the letter in the postbox this morning; I've ordered the program. The book says it really works, it says that thousands are becoming husky his way."

The program arrived in a few weeks and he followed it religiously. He was obsessed with measuring his biceps and his chest. As we passed through our early adolescence, he grew taller, but proportionately no wider or thicker. I tried to console him that he was taller than me, four whole inches taller. He wanted to be bulkier. He ate voraciously and his metabolism ate it as quickly. He was trying to get beyond the dreaded Ninety-Seven Pound Weakling of the Charles Atlas ads. He couldn't even get to ninety-seven until the last year of high school.

The Charles Atlas Dynamic Tension body building system seemed to have added nothing but frustration. His basement gradually filled with barbells, dumbbells and things with pulleys that I didn't recognise. I would do one-arm curls with the squat weights he could barely lift. Nothing he did added any bulk to his frame.

Looking back now half a century later, a simple analysis of body types: endomorph, mesomorph and ectomorph, shows he didn't stand a ghost of a chance of ever bulking-up; he was at the extreme end of ectomorph.