Day 56.

Almost done with February!!
Anyway this is a short-short story (under 500 words) for Mike's class that was supposed to be based on an overheard conversation. So... Zoe told me something she overheard him say. I'm a creeper. :D
"Anyways, Tim, the shirtless guy? He loved her for like ten years."


An Overheard Short Short

Tim the shirtless guy wasn't always shirtless. He used to have shirts. They just always got lost, somehow. Partly it was because he was a runner, who didn't need to be bothered with things rubbing in tender places or friction or chafing or worrying about sweat stains. He wore a t-shirt to the trailhead and then tied it to a nearby tree during his run, and was it his fault people treated things left in trees as cosmic gifts?
Somewhere along the line, he just plain ran out of shirts. There were drawbacks: he couldn't go to fancy restaurants, obviously, and his mother fretted over what society would think. But he found that, with enough confidence, he could pretty much go anywhere. Mostly he went to the smoothie place two blocks from home. The first day he'd gone in, the barista nodded at him and said, "You know, we usually don't allow shirtless people in Blend Over."
"I have a shirt on!" he says. She gives him a skeptical look. "Only the worthy can see it." He notices that she's on a footstool, and that her smile threatens to take over her face.
"Ohh," she says, "that shirt." He beams.
He went to the smoothie place every day, at first under the pretense of ordering one of everything. They were his excuse: the strawberry-banana, the mango-peach, the raspberry-lime. But when he tilted the Styrofoam cup to his lips and drank, he tasted the focused look on her face before she looked up and saw him; the practiced, graceful way she moved her stool around so she could see over the counter; the way her hair shone in the sun; the meandering of her hands.
What she never told him was that she had given her two weeks notice the day he came in, and retracted it the day after, when he came in again and looked at her over his drink menu and asked how she was, and waited to hear a real answer. Once he invited her on a run. It was like racing a child. She accused him of trying to lose (she was right) and blamed it on her short stature (she was half-right.) She invented new flavors for him, smoothies without name.
She started drawing again. She scrawled portraits on the ordering pad; she drew on napkins and stared enviously at the artists with their sketchbooks in Blend Over. She went to art college, something she'd been meaning to do for ages, and bought Tim a shirt she decorated herself: it read "I am a Cursed Shirt and if you Steal me you Die a Thousand Fiery Deaths." Sometimes he even wore it. She was gone for a long time.
Tim ran to her college once, but the way their eyes met wasn't the same, and they both agreed, in a stilted, awkward conversation, that it would be better if he kept running.
Tim the shirtless guy loved her for ten years.