BORIS WALKED AND WALKED AND

Boris walked and walked and walked. He knew if he stopped he would grow fat and die. It was glandular, they had said, not unlike morbid obesity, except for the speed. Boris’s brother was obese, and not ostensibly dead, but functionally so. IV, imprisoned in a house with small doors, trapped by the increasingly intimate relationship between his mass and that of the planet below him. But not Boris. By the time Boris was born, the condition had been fully described, and treatment had been developed, a very simple treatment entirely within Boris’s capabilities. He walked. Constantly. He ate while we walked, read while he walked, even slept while he walked on a specialized treadmill. He had a job as a meter maid constantly cruising around the city streets, circling the occasional parked car as he filled out a ticket. It was too late for his brother, who would never again move under his own strength, and though the thought of him twisted Boris’s heart into a painful, sorry knot, it kept Boris walking, for he knew if he stopped for even a minute, he too would be trapped.

But Boris was happy. He knew his life wasn’t normal, and he never made any good friends, since all his interactions were necessarily fleeting. But that was life as he had always lived it, and it had ceased to bother him beyond the occasional pang. Besides, his lifestyle gave him a novel viewpoint. Most people moved along predictable paths, from home to work to lunch to work back home again, with minor excursions on weekends. But Boris’s spatial realm of everyday experience covered much more. While the ordinary person became familiar with the five or six streets they traveled everyday and their associated landmarks (the Chinese Herbalist’s, the homeless woman with the broken sax, the mysterious stain on the corner outside the Smelly Diner), Boris saw the entire city. He walked almost every street, every day. His sphere of existence was simply larger, as if he occupied more space in the city than the average citizen. Like the Flash, he sometimes liked to think, everywhere at once. But slower, of course.

Please continue the story of Boris