At the top of the stairs Sonya sits at last, Appalachian chest heaving. She pulls off the sneakers in the privacy of the stair well and massages her feet, letting her face form … well let’s call it her ‘arrival face’, the expression she reserves for those intimate moments with Mr Fantasy and the contents of the bedside cabinet drawer. That it is the last day of the step challenge hardly registers in the ecstacy. She won’t win, though she doesn’t know that. To date, she never won anything.

Since age eight, her nemesis has been her weight. The dumpy friend, the frumpy classmate, never on the team, never at the dance. Now in her mid-twenties she is determined to change; to hell with genetics, the doomsayers be damned. The prize of a holiday in the Bahamas is not the end, nor even a beginning.

She has a picture on her fridge, a lingerie model with her face stuck on it, captioned: Super Sonya. That’s her goal. She never makes it. Though the picture does end up overlain by crayon drawings and tapioca mosaics. She also avoids diabetes and the coronary at forty.

Her latest Mr Fantasy is Tom, but he won’t make it to her fridge. ‘Morning Sonya,’ he grins, appearing at the top of the stairs. Oh Christ! Has he seen ‘that face’, or the holes in her stocking soles? She giggles pathetically and mentally picks at the stigmata of her self-esteem. In his hand he holds her sneaker with the pedometer.

‘Wow, look at those numbers. You’re really going for it. I can see you on that beach in the Bahamas.’

He flashes those hammer white teeth again, the crooked molars that give him the look of a newly woken vampire. That’s how she sees him, biting into her frothy pink neck as she grabs a fistful of his curly black hair. Her rosy face reddens at the thought and she stares at the carpet tiles. Uninvited, she thinks of a beached whale. Was that what Tom was thinking? She shrugs, laughs nervously and mumbles incoherently. She takes the shoe without meeting his gaze.

Tom felt a twinge of guilt when he pressed the reset button, but the numbers on Sonya’s pedometer had rocked him; lose to Supersize Sonya – the thought! The gut swelling must be stress related, his red eyes overwork, he needs that prize, that break, that beach. But there is no time for walkies: kids to pick up from his ex, Hannah’s sister to bed, and the flat, the flat needs so much work before Liz moves in. When he saw those numbers he knew he had underestimated Sonya. Somewhere inside that human big bang is a girl with will power. Something he doesn’t possess; his tongue down his wife’s sister’s throat was proof of that. One drink too many and five years of marriage go pop; relationships just break apart, like debris in space. Liz is the one though, he knows it now.

A shame he is wrong. Even now a professional footballer named Zak Apeth is signing the papers to take possession of the flat two doors down. A flat that would see Liz pinned on the wide receiver’s kitchen table one Friday night, begging Zak to go long. Tom ends up moving to the Bahamas, running a pitiful pedalo business, desperately trying to recreate that last vacation they had together, desperately looking for the reset button.

Funny how things work out.

Reset

Beebles

Absurd

A Gift

Dalwhinnie's Diplomacy