Free Three Scoops is a Blast! by Alex Carrick

inspired rabbit out of his hat. Just as Keith was changing into his trunks, Lenny dragged a young man into the locker room who promptly set up a camera on a tripod. “It’s for my company’s newsletter,” Lenny explained. “The goal is to encourage other employees to take up an exercise program like mine. You don’t mind, do you?”
     
    Without skipping a beat, Keith struck a muscleman pose in the background and that’s how the whole session went. When it was over, Lenny hustled his young protégé out the door and was disgusted he’d wasted $50 setting up a fake photo shoot.
     
    In early February, a certain level of fatigue began to settle in with respect to their battle. Lenny was developing a grudging respect for Keith’s chutzpah and Keith had never been opposed to Lenny in the first place. They began to talk more. Lenny noticed Keith’s accent became more intermittent. When asked about it, Keith said he was a quick learner.
     
    Furthermore, Lenny had other problems on his mind. He needed all of his wisdom teeth removed. For a week after the surgery, he was laid up and didn’t go to the club. The two men found they missed each other. They both looked forward to seeing one another again.
     
    On the first day Lenny returned, his mouth still felt like it was filled with cotton batting. “How you feeling?” Keith asked. “I guess you’re still in a lot of pain.”
     
    Lenny nodded his head.
     
    “Is there anything you can do about it?”
     
    “The only wemedy is west,” said Lenny.
     
    “Just the same, it must be getting on your nerves.”
     
    “I’m taking twanqwilizers.”
     
    “Life can be a bitter pill sometimes.”
     
    “Too twue. Too twue.”
     
    So the days went by and the bonding between Lenny and Keith grew apace. But contentment and peace are not the lot of man. They, among all people, should have known that their “ideal” could not be enduring. On the Ides of March, their more simpatico world was turned upside down.
     
    Lenny and Keith simultaneously sensed the new presence that slipped into the space between them in the pool. Cutting through the water with grace and elegance was a young lady of obvious abilities. Bobbing up and down, head and backside alternately in and out of the water, she motored along with powerful strokes that left the other two in her wake. This was a woman with training, experience and porpoise-like talent.
     
    After returning to the locker room, the two men looked at each other in consternation.
     
    “What did you think of that?” said Keith.
     
    “Show-offy and excessive,” was Lenny’s response.
     
    “I agree, but what can we do about it?”
     
    “We have to come up with a plan.”

 
    The Mechanized Sorting Day of the Dead
     
    December 31, 2009
     
    Now that he was dead, Norman Watts was in possession of certain information that someone in the living world would have given an arm and a leg to discover. Forget Halloween or Dia de los Muertos or any of those other days of the year when the departed are supposed to be revered. They might have been more meaningful in earlier times, but circumstances had changed. Mechanization had come to the afterlife. With respect to sorting out the good from the bad and those to be rewarded from those to be punished, there was a new way of doing things. Everything now happened once per annum. That day was far more obvious from the back side of the curtain than from the front.
     
    There is a time of year when it becomes nigh on impossible not to think about relatives and friends now departed. It’s a time of great joy but also deep sadness. When the sense of loss can be overwhelming and memories of moments spent with grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, friends and loved ones can sweep one away in a flood of regret for shared occasions no longer accessible.
     
    It’s a time of year when popular music playing everywhere features lyrics that squeeze the heart. The whole season is a setup to