The Hardyman, page 9 by Susannah Breslin
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sides. He lifted his right foot, and, wobbling a little, set it forward. He picked up his left foot, and, teetering somewhat, set it next to his right. Raising one arm, he inadvertently swiped the other arm across his workbench, sending a glue-gun flying out the window with a loud crash. In six giant steps, he had crossed the garage.
Later, Jack stood in the driveway. The Hardyman was tucked safely away in the garage, but he could still feel it reverberating through him. He felt bigger now, it seemed. Meanwhile, dusk had fallen. Across the street, he could see the aging bachelor standing in his driveway, his face pressed against the bars of his gate, his round eyes bulging out from behind the two O's in YOUNGWOOD. The older man waved frantically at Jack, a desperate look on his face. Jack waved absentmindedly back at the other man, turned on his heel, and went inside.
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After that day, Jack spent little time at his office focused on this work. Now, his job was a place where he went for eight hours to fantasize about his home project as his disembodied hands directing meaningless reams of paper from his desk to someone else's. He could sit for hours with a single-page memo before him, his eyes gliding back and forth across the page as his mind rode around inside the Hardyman at home. Once, Jack's supervisor, Brad MeCoy, had come upon Jack practicing walking like a robot between two rows of empty cubicles. Jack's arms were sticking straight out, his legs as stiff as boards. Brad had looked quizzically at Jack. After that, Brad had not come back.
On a morning several weeks later, Jack awoke before sunrise. He had outgrown the confines of the garage, he had decided. He wanted to take a few exploratory steps into the driveway before the rest of the neighborhood woke up. Outside, he opened the garage door, and he began his now skilled donning of the Hardyman. With relative ease and a growing sense of automaton-like coordination, Jack stepped his way across the garage in the suit towards the