tight pecs

Tight pecs, she said. The massage therapist. He was on his stomach. When he flipped to the other side, on his back, like a salmon on a cedarwood plank being grilled, she said it again.

Tight pecs.

She said it factually, indifferently, with no judgment implied. Nevertheless, her repeated assessment unsettled him if only because she hadn't said anything at all (nor him either, uncharacteristically), since she had said, All right now. No more talking, enjoy this, at the beginning of the session.

So, he wondered to himself, were my pectoral muscles so tight she could even tell from the back, it was that noticeable oh boy.

He took no blame, felt no shame. What do you expect after all these years, all these chest-tightening events (CTEs), this parade of pectoral crossings?

Then, on his back, posed morgue-corpse-like, eyes REM-fluttering, the massage being so soothing, so somnolent, his mind (and body) drifted off, untethered from orderly language and thought. Pec. Pecs. Peccavi. Penance. Pick a peck. Peckish. Pecking order. Tight pecs. Loose pecs. Henpecked. Pickled.

And so on, peter-pauling off into Faulknerian-Joycean incoherence, and then pre-Freudian, Jungian gibberish.

Her hands continued their soporific, salutary journey, aided by exotic emollients from unnamed islands south of Madagascar. Her healing hands advanced their sacred mission of sensual reparations, carrying the dessicated, wounded cells back from undisclosed unwinnable battlefields.

Her hands.

His mind.

Like a reverse-backward-forward-slo-mo-1980s-MTV video, like a 1960s LSD-laced kaleidoscopic vision of the Desert Fathers, his gibberish scrambled, rescrambled, and jigsaw-puzzle-solved into something reminiscent of language, suggestive of logic.

Her hands regrooved the worn roads of his pecs. YIELD. Work Zone. 

A configuration of notions, letters, syllables, words lined up on the shore of rationality. Sentries or sentinels, reporting for duty. Reporting for sanity.

I got it, he said, a toddler finding his missing marble, the cerulean cat's-eye with turquoise pupil. I got it.

What, she said.

Tight pecs.

What.

It's easy, he said. So simple.

What.

I have tight pecs because they're trying to protect my heart from ever being wounded again, he said.

Oh.

Oh.

She pressed down on the plastic pump, twice, thrice. More emollients for her traveled and trained hands. Back to work.