My friends and I are in an on-again/off-again writing club where the rules are simple. Every two weeks you have to submit three short stories that it took you 20 minutes or less to write. These are the results.

He sailed down the center of the bar in a wheelchair, gliding through the trough between the stools and the tables, throwing a thumbs up at the swarthy girl in an apron leaning against the waitress station.

Nothing below the knees, when he got excited he’d beat his lonely thighs like a pair of drumsticks against his chair.  He wheeled himself everywhere.  From home to work as a dog walker, from the dogs to the bar.  He wheeled chair marathons–14 straight miles on the side of a highway and a curved momentum through the suburbs.

Every muscle attached to his torso was enormous.  He looked like a hairless alpha chimp in a wheelchair-shaped kilt.   He could throw a 14 person faux-formica folding table through a cafeteria window.  There were rumors he outran a patrol car just with his arms and a homemade handbrake, power sliding through subdivisions, losing the cops in the woods behind the Oakland Mills pool.

Self-conscious of his protruding veins, he wore tattoo sleeves on both arms.  His right was a caricaturist’s idea of Japanese scroll art, kabukis and leaping koi, dragons and half-naked samurai.  The left arm, closest to his heart, held 352 video game characters, edges and depths overlapped like stickers on a light pole.