I Feel Good — Part One
By Glen Engel-Cox
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I Feel Good
By Glen Engel-Cox
I knew something had changed when my son Kevin showed up on my doorstep one day after lunch and it wasn’t a holiday or his birthday.
“Hey, Mom,” he said with a silly grin on his face I hadn’t seen since he was a chubby three-year-old. “I’m here to help.”
“Help with what?”
“Oh, anything you need done around the house.”
That was the second clue. Kevin had as many handyman abilities as a snake has legs. “Who are you and what have you done with my son?”
“Mom!”
“Aren’t you supposed to be working?” I asked.
“They don’t need me today. It’s just a bunch of boring test tubes anyway. But, really, what can I do for you?”
I put the back of my hand up to his forehead. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m feeling great, Mom. I feel good. Come on, let’s get something done.”
I started to wonder what he might have done to bring about this sudden change of heart. Murder someone? Embezzled funds? Kevin had never been a go-getter, happy to simply float along the river of life. Sure, he got a biochemistry degree, but after college he moved back into my basement and landed a basic tech job at Pfister. I had been happy when he finally moved out of the house a year ago, hoping he had turned a corner, maybe even get a girlfriend, even a boyfriend—I didn’t care—but, no, it turned out that he had lucked into housesitting for a couple who had moved to Asia and their house had a faster wifi and the video game feed I refused to buy.
“You’re always talking about how you need help around the house since Dad’s been gone. Where’s your list of projects?”
Kevin’s father had been dead for over a decade and this is the first time Kevin had ever suggested he might be able to do some of those things Paul had been good at and I struggled with.
“If you’re serious,” I said, trying to break myself out of my shock, “You could help me clean out the attic. Your father kept a lot of old magazines for some ungodly reason.” National Geographics, Travel & Leisure, Pathfinders. He told me he planned to use them to research the places we’d travel to after he retired. Then he had a stroke a year before his forty-fifth anniversary at Ford and we never went anywhere.
“Let’s do it!”
He spent the rest of the afternoon helping me sort, dump, and rearrange the remainder of what had been gathering dust upstairs, only stopping when I suggested we have dinner. After a quick pasta meal, he gave me a peck on the cheek and left for his home. I mentioned it to my church friend Sue on our early morning walk the next day and we both chalked it up to residual guilt.
That was in late February, of course, before the reports started coming in. A few good deeds here and there at first, and then suddenly, the world became flooded with kindness. The Giving Plague, some began to call it. Officially the government named it Sudden Onset Behavior Shifts or SOBS.
Glen Engel-Cox has published a novel, Darwin’s Daughter; a non-fiction compilation, First Impressions; and short fiction in LatineLit, Utopia, Nature, Triangulation, Factor Four, SFS Stories, and elsewhere. He publishes a daily newsletter about authors and events in literature as part of his Patreon account: join for free at patreon.com/gengelcox.
Copyright © 2025 Glen Engel-Cox