Synopsis: You figure this one out. I wasn't sure myself.
 

Wasted Potential Energy

By
Allystra Krane
 
edited by Sephrena Miller

 
 

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 It was another cold and windy day, as a man buried in layers of coats scarves, woolen mittens and heavy trousers stumbled into a small shop along the edge of Main Street.

He hadn't recognized the store before, despite having walked past almost every day on his way in to work. This time however, the marquee sign above the door, "Body Image" struck something and he felt compelled to enter.

Inside he found a myriad of exercise machines along one wall and a counter with a bar behind it along the other. The man attending the bar smiled as he greeted. "Welcome to Body Image, how can we help?"

Strangely, though he didn't know the man, nor had he ever been here, something compelled him to sit down at the bar and talk about his life to a complete stranger.

"Well..." he said, taking a seat, "my job is basically bullshit. I am supposed to be a manager, but all my employees I am supposed to be managing all now report to my superior as well as me. Anytime I set a goal, he counters it and issues his own. So I'm basically waiting for the axe to fall."

"Dreadful. Have you been looking for any other employment?"

"Yeah, but I seem to lack the qualifications anyone is looking for."

"That can't be the whole reason you look like ten miles of bad road?"

"Yeah, then there is my wife. She's cheating on me, I'm sure of it. I could care less; the love is long gone from the relationship anyway. Oh, and my car broke down on the way here, so I'm technically late for work, but I don't really care."

"Hmm, well I think I have just the thing to cheer you up," said the bartender. "One of our special protein shakes."

The bartender began adding ice cream and several spoonfuls of a powder from a jar into a blender. This was followed by several ounces of a pink liquid from a bottle that looked like it should belong next to a frappacino machine. The man surmised it was flavoring, likely cherry or raspberry, to mask the taste of the protein powder.

The blender ground to a halt after a minute of angry noise proliferated throughout the shop.

"Here you go," said the bartender, pouring the thick pink formula into a tall glass. "This one is on the house. Hope it makes you feel better."

The man stared at it for a few seconds, unsure how to begin, before the bartender slid a straw in, the business end pointing right at him. "Sorry, I forget that sometimes."

He looked at the straw, worried how it would look if someone else came in and saw him, with his suit and tie and mild male-pattern-baldness, sucking on a straw.

He shrugged his shoulders and pursed his lips on the hollow tube and was surprised at the pleasant taste to the mixture. He had misjudged the flavor as it was more of a bubblegum one.

The shake seemed to disappear all too quickly and he was now sitting at the bar with a curiously warm sensation in his stomach, despite having just drunk a cold beverage.

"So what's with this club?" he asked. "You serve health drinks for people while they do their work out?"

"Something like that," answered the bartender. "Most people come in here needing to work off something. Maybe its love handles, maybe it's something else. The machines don't judge the reason."

"Well, what have I got to lose?" the man said as he hopped down from the barstool and made his way to the row of machines. He stopped at the stationary bike. "Now this is a waste. You ride a bike for an hour and you never go anywhere."

"You'd be surprised," replied the bartender. "Even something designed not to move can have the effect of changing one's perspective."

"Yeah," said the man as he took off his jacket. "But when I get done using this, I'll still be looking at you and the bar."

The bartender smiled and went back to drying glassware, as the man got on the stationary bike and began with a slow pedal.

After a minute he began working his way up to a rigorous pace, the humming of the resistance band across the hub of the bike whirring and straining in ever increasing amounts.

But the man wasn't paying much attention; for he had closed his eyes and was trying to picture himself riding the bike through the green hilly countryside, leading the race in the Tour de France.

He felt as though he was imagining the world past his eyelids even getting brighter and even a warm, salty breeze brushing past his face.

It was then he noticed the handlebars were shifting on him. His hands felt as they were moving back behind his hips, but no amount of effort could allow him to release them or to open his eyes to see what was happening.

The light in his face was getting brighter and brighter, and he finally wrenched his eye open...
 

~*~
 
to face the shore, possibly two hundred feet below the edge of the cliff he was staring down into. The rising sun directly ahead of him blinded him for an instant, and possibly caused him to plummet to his death if it not for the fact that his hands were firmly locked onto a railing behind him.

This was when he felt himself grabbed from behind and forcibly towed over the railing and onto the ground by two large men in police uniforms.

Stunned and unable to make a coherent thought, much less act. He felt like a weak puppet as they laid him easily onto a gurney and strapped him down.

As the ambulance sped off he was made painfully aware of two things. The first was that they had fitted one of the straps too high and it was rubbing against the bottom of his breasts and the second was that He Had Breasts!

Looking up at the EMT looked down and he recognized the face.

The bartender nodded. "Sorry about the rude welcoming, but I'm sure you want to know why you look like a nineteen year old girl. The simple answer is that you are now occupying the body of Diane Miller, who just ten minutes ago, decided to end her life by jumping off a cliff. Unfortunately, her body didn't follow her in that decision as a higher power had a different idea."

He looked toward the driver. "He can't hear us now. He is too focused on the road and his mission to realize that I possessed his partner."

"Who are you?" Diane asked. "Why did you do this to me?"

"Do you remember this morning? I mean, your morning. You didn't take your car to the parking ramp as usual and walk the six blocks in the cold to your office."

"No, I stopped into your shop!" Diane snapped. "And now I'm in the body of a girl."

"No, what I mean is. You never made it to the parking ramp at all. Your wife cut your break line and it leaked out slowly enough that it failed just as you were approaching the intersection at thirty-eighth."

Suddenly Diane's mind flashed back. He saw the woman in the crosswalk, appearing in the empty lane from in front of a stopped car just as the light turned green. He had attempted to stop, but the pedal fell to the firewall with no effort, and he had no time to yell out.

As her vision refocused onto the bartender turned Ambulance Tech, her lips slowly trembled and formed words.

"I-I-Is... she okay?"

"You sacrificed your life to save hers. You wrenched your steering wheel hard to the right and plowed into the retaining wall for that office building's outdoor smoking section. Admittedly there are about three hundred people upset that you ruined their smoke breaks for the next twelve days until they fixed it, but no one but yourself was injured in any way."

"And I died?"

"Well," said the man, "it just wasn't your day. The 'Axe', as you so put it, was coming down today, if you had actually made it into the office that is."

"But at the moment of crisis, you thought nothing of your own life and only of that woman, who was illegally crossing the street. Actions like that do not go unnoticed. If it's any consolation, your wife left her fingerprints all over the break lines and the underside of the car, the police got a solid case and thanks to saved records on her computer, they were able to get her lover as an accomplice. They will both be spending a long time in prison."

"So why am I Diane now?" she asked. "And where are you taking me?"

"Diane made the decision to end her life of her own free will and so her spirit jumped off that cliff, but her body held on, waiting patiently while everything came into place."

"The Police, the Ambulance and the witnesses who called it in all took about ten minutes, and that's when your spirit, devoid of a body, went from the shop to where you awoke only to get pulled off the cliff and stuffed in here with me."

Diane looked down at herself. "So, this is me now? I don't get a choice in this?"

"Well, not right away. You should be happy you aren't dead anymore."

"But why a girl?"

"It's not by my choice. Diane could have gone on to make something of her life, if she only knew how easy of a life she actually had. Instead she was a typical, shallow teenager who was obsessed with fashion, trendiness and spoiled rotten. She had decided to end her life to punish her parents for the ridicule she received because they wouldn't buy her a new car. She lent her previous one to the tight end on the football team only for him to wreck it after a night of underage binge drinking."

"How insensitive," Diane muttered. "Will she be punished, now that..."

"You'd be surprised at the afterlife actually, not that I can tell you about it. All the petty things that govern life on this planet are laughable there."

"So more ridicule is in her future?"

"A bit, yeah. But, the reason you get her body is because the higher power thinks you have potential that you were wasting, so you get the chance to try again. As for being a girl, well spirits don't have a gender; it's the vessel they take for their time on earth that determines that. The higher power decided this would be your new vessel and if you feel there is a bit of twisted humor in it, well don't blame me."

"You keep saying higher power, do you mean God?"

"I say that, because I don't have the ability to say what it is, nor do you have the capacity to understand it even if I could. 'It' prefers not to be referred to as God, because it never did anything that was attributed to God in those three editions of the holy books that humans worship. I say higher power, because that best describes it in a manner you understand."

"Now on to your second question. 'You' just attempted suicide and it is the only crime known to man that you will never be tried and incarcerated if you actually succeed, but only if you fail."

"I admit that this isn't a perfect rebirth. You face a few kinks at the start, but I'm sure you will apply your astounding determination and resolve to them, just as your spirit did, returning to the task of making it to work, even after your body was long gone."

"Here are the cliff-notes of the new life you might need to know," he said as he touched Diane's forehead and she felt a flood of information enter her mind. Places, dates and people, including her new parents and she realized that these people loved and cared for their daughter.
 

~*~
 
With tears forming in her eyes, she closed them, unable to wipe the fluid from her eyes, only to have one peeled open by the EMT holding a flashlight. His voice was unfamiliar and she realized that the bartender had had left.

"She's coming back around!" the man shouted toward the driver. "Thought shock was setting in, but she is responding to the flashlight."

"Where are you taking me?" she asked, while futiley trying to release her arm to get the flashlight out of her face.

"What’s your name?" the EMT asked.

"Ray-rai-... Diane Margaret Miller," was the response.

"How many fingers?"

"Two up, one down and the pinky is crooked only halfway..."
 

~*~
 
Diane sipped the lemon tea, and then set the glass back down on its coaster on the patio table, leaning back into the wicker chair to tap a few keys on her laptop that she was quietly staring into. Sitting on the rear patio of her parents modest ranch estate; she stopped to reflect on everything.

More than five years now had passed since that fateful day. She had also learned that three years had passed from 'His' death to 'Her' rebirth.

Spending a two weeks in the psych ward at the hospital as a model patient had given her the time to adjust to the new body. Diane had graduated high school Magna Cum Laude only a week earlier and the shock of someone with such intelligence offing themselves over such a petty excuse gave her even more resolve do what the previous inhabitant had not. Therapy went quickly and the doctors attributed her lack of conscious to peer pressure.

Her parents had been upset, but grateful to the officers who saved her. Diane attempted to show some sense of bitterness toward them at first as a lark. She wanted to hug them and tell them she was going to be alright, but that would come later.

It took some getting used to, mostly on her parent’s part, as she began chastising them for spoiling her so badly. She turned down the new car her father offered, in an effort to try to make her feel better, and instead asked for a bicycle. She remembered the shock on her father's face when she insisted on a bike "That only went where it was pointed toward."

As for relationships, she had never lost the attraction toward women, and hadn't gained a real attraction toward men, so all the prospective suitors that her mother sent her way ended up wondering why they were getting ignored. She figured romance could wait and if they were truly interested in her, they would too. On the other front, she was a little frightened of going out to meet women. Her father was thinking of entering politics and Diane was going to keep the scandal material from her to a minimum.
 

~*~
 
Diane was broken out of her musings as her parents stepped out onto the patio with cups and sat down opposite her at the table.

"Good morning dear. You're up quite early," said her mother.

"Just getting a good start on the day. I have another six online classes to finish this semester."

"How many does that make in total?" her father asked, beaming.

"Twenty-one credit hours and I'll be done with all of them in the first month. Gives me plenty of time to slack off afterward."

"Your father and I were thinking of going out for a round of golf, would you like to join us?"

"Golf?" Diane laughed. "You must be joking. This day has potential and I refuse to let any go to waste ever again."

"Golf is hardly a waste of time," her father retorted with a smile.

"It is if you don't know how to play!" Diane exclaimed with a smile. "I'd take forever."

"Alright then, how about mini-golf then? I'm sure you can putt into a snake's mouth just as well as I can."

"You're on old man. Loser buys lunch," said Diane as she stood out and brushed off her skirt. "I can spend some quality time with you, and that's not a waste at all."
 

Fin

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