Fishbowl by Bradley Somer

from the exertion of his climb. There are damp moats under his arms and a sweaty V shape between his shoulder blades. There’s a gap between him and the wall, and without breaking his stride, Herman slides through that space between flesh and concrete. Herman’s vision is jaunty with movement, but his mind is smooth with autonomic motion. It feels like he’s floating, moving without thought, just pure action.
    “Easy there, kid,” the man says.
    The voice fades to echoes behind Herman as he rounds the next landing and launches up another flight of stairs.
    Herman knows he has to slow down soon. He isn’t fit enough to be sprinting up stairs for too long. His attentions have always been geared toward the academic at the expense of the physical. This has left him weedy and weak. He always has believed the body to be an appendix, an organ that society has outgrown and civilization has now rendered useless in favor of the brain. He realizes now that this deduction was a mistake.
    How could I have been so blind to sit out of every gym class? he thinks. Was “social dance” really too strenuous? He realizes now that one never knows when one needs strong legs.
    Ten more floors, two flights of stairs each, twenty in total, Herman thinks, vaulting up the next flight. The distance isn’t that far, but he feels like he can’t cover it fast enough. His legs burn with exertion. His lungs strain to provide oxygen to his muscles. Herman knows something is wrong in his apartment.
    Don’t let it be true, his thoughts beg. A tear streams from the corner of his eye and traces a glistening arc over the curve of his cheek.
    He can’t remember the last time he felt such fear and anxiety. He wills his body not to collapse. He wills his mind to focus, cursing it as useless at this crucial point when it was needed more than ever.
    As it often does, his mind starts releasing contorted images and filling in the gaps of time and place from his recent blackout. They filter back in disjointed bits and pieces, a puzzle he has to construct an image from. Herman remembers being upstairs, in the apartment. Grandpa was there, sitting in the living room, reading the paper. A cup of tea sat on the side table, releasing a wispy thread of steam into the late-afternoon light.
    Herman was working on a trigonometry assignment Grandpa had given him. The calculations of angles and lengths flash through his mind as a series of numbers on a page. The memory of his desk, the page on it, the equations scrawled across the paper, some crossed out and others circled. The pencil strokes were clear and magnified, viewed from so close they were pock-marked, thick graphite lines striking out across the fibrous expanse of paper. The tip of the pencil was a waxy moon rock from this magnified perspective.
    There was silence. The ticking clock in the living room, the street noise crawling into the apartment from outside, the whirring of the fridge’s compressor from the kitchen, all those usual noises that the brain typically ignored, they were absent. It was all quiet outside. The only sounds came from inside Herman. Herman breathing. Herman’s blood rushing in pulsing fits through his body. Herman inhaling as he pushed his chair back from the desk and stood. Herman huffing and rasping his way up one flight and to the next. The sound of his breathing is exaggerated by the close spaces of the stairwell, reverberating off the hard surfaces. The sound of his pulse deafens his ears.
    There are voices in the stairwell, coming from above or below he can’t tell. What they’re saying, he can’t tell. Echoes contort the sounds. Voices bounce off the walls so many times that they become garbled and unclear. Voices thick in the air all around, his memory drags one out of the din and into clarity. It’s his own voice in the silence of his apartment, sounding muffled in the flesh and bone of his own head, calling out after a moment’s pondering.
    “Grandpa,” it said. Herman