The Wrestler

He was well groomed, for a wrestler, and a hundred times more prim and proper than his rugby housemates. His hair was neat, a bit too neat, in fact, suggesting that that he may trim it several times a week as part of his preening and pruning. He flossed every day, afterwards a single white thread could be found floating in the toilet, born up by surface tension alone like a water strider doing yoga. A long crystalline crack in an otherwise flawless fluid, born by a porcelain basin and awaiting further influx. Erstwhile the suave young warrior was often found wandering in only a towel, neither begging nor resisting the looks of his many male housemates. He was comfortable. He had nothing to prove.

It took six sphinxes and a tube of contact cement to incapacitate our hero, and more than that the element of surprise. But there was no stopping the corporation, nothing would stand in their way as they continued their insidious campaign to convince otherwise fit and fair young folk that there was something wrong with them, that they needed to change. Indeed they would not settle until this belief had sunk so deep as to disrupt the very hopes and dreams of the youth, driven no longer by automobiles or pretty girls but by the hope for cosmetic completion, compared to the artistically designed multimedia concubines of primetime glory, who were no more human than a paper bag or the Mona Lisa. The twelve-year-olds all wore primer, and every year more and more infants were choking on their ties, death-by-double-Windsor had become a daily occurrence in small town America.