Michael Flanagan

Michael Flanagan is your ordinary man. He is the clerk at the local post office that checks out your mail and sells you stamps. Clocks in at 0900. Clocks out at 1630. You might never see him otherwise. Well, you might walk past him at the supermarket or in the mall but you wouldn’t really see him. He is not a man of presence. Short, stocky, around thirty-something, not unsightly but not attractive. In fact, his face doesn’t quite seem to match his body being altogether too round for the blocky body that supported it. But you really wouldn’t notice that on a cursory glance.

Michael’s only claim to fame is a hundred metre dash at Sommerville High when he was in year nine. He only ran once. And he won. Being an interclass event, nobody really took interest and in fact no one really remembers the race. But Michael ran it in eleven seconds even.

A colleague of mine ran some tests on a lump Michael had discovered in his left buttock some three years ago. The histopathologist’s report stated “…there is an unusual abundance of type IIB muscle fibres without any evidence of mitotic figures or cellular atypia to suggest a neoplastic process…” That means, Michael Flanagan, DOB 18/03/63, has the best sprinters muscle. He was born to be a sprinter, which, unfortunately for the rest of us, he is not.