Ashan 1 721
Yet another day came to existence as the sun rose o’re the horizon. The light peered through Goku’s curtains and shined right on his closed eyelids at just the right angle to evoke a response. The response was a grunt and a turned shoulder. It was far too early to be getting up. The quality of his night had not been great though this was the norm. Nightmares came often that generally held bad memories. Tack on his general inability to sleep made for a bad time. He rolled throughout the late hours to ultimately find a semi-satisfactory pose in bed just to have the sun tell him that it was all for naught. A great many minutes went by in which Goku considered sleeping through the day which was a hard proposition to discount. He slept.
Goku woke about mid day. “Did I really do that,” he chastised. He cared less about his horrid sleep schedule than he did about the punishment for sleeping in. He often punished himself for messing up so that he could make the best of a bad mistake. He consulted a large parchment that had been nailed to his wall that listed out the various consequences. He squinted his eyes and attempted to make out his poor handwriting. “Sleeping in… till mid day… One hundred Push Ups.” The quantity increased by how much he had overslept. Just an hour more would have resulted in even more punishment.
“One hundred, you bumbling baffoon…” he swore loudly. He dropped onto the floor and started counting while doing pushups to the best of his ability. “One, two three,” he whispered between grunts. They weren’t difficult to perform in small quantities for anyone of his age and health. By the time he got to ten however… they became a lot more difficult. His form suffered and his triceps begged for a break. “Fifteen!” he shouted before he dropped down to the floor of his bedroom. He had a lot more to go. Math wasn’t his strong suit so subtracting fifteen from one hundred required some paper to work out. He’d just count all the way to a hundred. “It’s simpler that way.”
The next round of push ups began. Goku noticed that he was sweating at the edge of the hair on his head. The sweat formed droplets that grew bigger every time he went down and fell every time he went up. He shook under his own weight by the time he hit thirty which was his next break point. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to do fifteen in a row anymore and he wasn’t even half way done yet. “You did it to yourself ya bastard,” he said after he took a swig and rested against the wall for a few minutes.
Goku got to thirty five before a knock on his door interrupted him. “Come in!” he called. “Thirty six… thirty seven…”
“The door’s locked,” someone called. The voice was childish. The kids wanted to play already? Goku hopped to his feet and opened the door. Standing in front of him was a fruit salesman. He was the son of a fruit seller who was just doing his rounds. “Want some?” he asked Goku, “what’s going on in there? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Goku gave the kid a weird look. “I’m just exercising. I slept in so I have to do a hundred push ups. I’m at forty now.” Goku reached down and grabbed a fruit and passed the child some coins from his pocket. He normally would have sent the kid on his way but the sugar from the fruit was too delicious to resist when he was in desperate need of energy.
“Working out is gross. You get all sweaty. My da’ always said that only people without brains have to work out because the only thing they have is their bodies an’ they need that for work.” The kid didn’t mean anything by it. He was merely regurgitating what he thought was relevant information.
“Well your da’ is pretty well off. I bet he hasn’t needed a good body for anything since he’s got a brain and money.” Goku said. He thought that his money was enough to get those awesome servants and wife too but he didn’t need to go mentioning that to the child. “As for me,” he said, “I’m trying to get at least strong enough to hold my own in a fight. Then from there I want to learn how to use some weapons. There’s always a demand for some good muscle around town and I thought, why not live it up while I’m still young?”
“Ahahaha, you’re not young you’re an old man!” the child said, “have a good one Goku,” he added. He winked at him and went off after putting the change into his secure money box.
Goku didn’t know why he always opened up to the neighborhood kids when he consistently took their sass. Talking to witty teenagers was about the most humbling things he thought someone could go through. He stood lost in thought about the kid he’d conversed with and how much he had grown throughout the years. It felt like just yesterday that he had helped the kid learn how to hop from stone to stone in the park and swing from the old tree swing. Goku smiled while the good memories filled his mind.
“You’ve still many more push ups to go,” he said to himself but he wasn’t going to go back inside to finish them. The breeze was much nicer outdoors. He dropped onto the ground in front of his door and finished up his one hundred push ups over the hour. Many breaks were necessary to build up his muscles and he got more than a few sideways looks from women that passed by on the streets. If goku was honest with himself that was probably the real reason he wanted to get and stay in shape. He wasn’t getting any younger so finding romance was pretty high on his list of priorities, though he would never admit that to himself.
When he had finally finished with his punishment Goku stood up and looked around. There were plenty of people to talk to and that was precisely what he intended to do. “Charlene, how goes it?” he asked, walking over to the easiest woman to talk to around here. He leaned against a wooden fence and smiled at her and before he knew it she went into an elaborate story about her job. It all went out Goku’s other ear but he knew that talking to Charlene was a one way ticket to crispy treats. She was a widow who had nothing better to do with her life than enjoy the money she and her husband had saved over the years and cook. She was incredibly good at both. Not ten minutes later and Goku’s belly was provided with enough treats to ensure that he wouldn’t have to eat for the rest of the day.
“Good seeing you,” he called out while waving as he left. “now, what was I supposed to do today?” Goku went back to his home and noticed that there was some garbage that had flown in from the street. They were mostly pieces of parchment which he gathered up one by one into a small pile that he ended up tying together with some vine off the side of his house. He tossed it out to the edge of his property so that it could be gathered up by the public servants. “Looks like just a bunch of chores for the day then?”
The back yard needed some work too. The spring had caused some water to puddle up in some areas of his yard which was never good for insects. He had to get a bucket and transfer the water out to the street which was a lot more painful than usual due to his already aching chest. “Boy oh boy,” he said when he noticed just how late in the day it’d gotten. He hadn’t done all too much yet it felt like a full day had gone by just by how tired he was.
“Stretches, yes of course,” he remembered as an afterthought to all the manual labor. He didn’t know a single way to stretch the chest but his triceps were easy enough. He held one arm across his chest and used his other arm to hold his elbow and pulled slightly. He was hardly an acrobat but his stretches kept him somewhat flexible and made himself hurt a lot less than when he didn’t do them at all.
By the time stretches were done it was about time for Goku to head off on his evening walk around the neighborhood. While he didn’t get any money out of it, he liked making regular rounds around the place. He liked to think that checking up on how people were doing was a great way to build relationships.
