KICK- INSTALLMENT #5

Kick settled into the familar business of fishing. He was a man of well traveled paths. There was seldom anyting about Kick that would strike you as new or different. He always wore the same tired clothes, and if they gave out he replaced them with similar ones. He always talked about the same things, watched the same TV shows, and meal after meal he ate the same foods. It seemed that in every facet of life he had long since settled into a well worn rut, a predictable channel.

His mind was no different. Criss-crossing his mind were the same old paths that had been there for years. Fishing, the shop, money, girls... the woods between paths were untrammeled, unexplored. There had been other paths when Kick was a child, but those had long since been swallowed up, reclaimed by the forest of a clouded mind. Only the faintest trace of them remained.

Through reptition, the mechanics of fishing came as naturally to Kick as lifting a spoon. It was not an activity that he needed to think about as he did it, and, as he fished, his mind wandered down the old path of lust and longing. Jenny was a new flower that had bloomed along that path, but to be sure it was the same old path. There had been other girls before Jenny.

All paths should have a destination, but Kick's ran in a loop, doubling back, and covering the same ground over and over again without ever going anywhere or accomplishing anything. Paths which should have served to access marvelous things had become an end to themselves, a mind numbing and tedious circle, bringing him within sight of things that he never actually experienced.

Sometimes it takes something wildly unexpected, something totally out of left field, to chase a man off of his established paths, and into the forest. As Kick reeled in his line for the last time that day he had no idea that just such a thing was about to happen to him- something brand new.