All Tied Up
Stuart Docherty
We’d been looking for Freddie for hours when we found him. He was still in the yoga studio, still on his mat. Something had gone wrong; he was all tied up in himself and couldn’t get free. His elbows had merged with his ankles, and his right foot had conjoined to his shoulder. His head was tucked under the crook of his knee, and he went wide eyed when we burst into the room.
“Freddie,” we said, “what’s happened to you?”
“Nothing,” Freddie said back. “The usual. You know.”
He wasn’t suffering. He was there, all mixed up, and smiling. When I stepped around the other side of him, there he was, still smiling.
“Quit looking at me like that, Fred,” someone on the other side of him said. “You’re freaking me out.”
When we tried to help him out of it, he started to weep then shout at us.
“I’m no different than you all,” he said. “Just leave me be.”
And so, we did.
Stuart is a British writer and poet based in Tokyo, where he writes, eats too much, and pretends to speak Japanese.