Which was not strictly true. He had two perfectly good legs right there in front of him, on the computer screen. Long sleek legs, shiny and supple, muscular and firm, unadorned and ready for action. But they were not Paul's legs. They were someone else's legs. Paul only had them in the sense that they were on the screen, making him drool, and there was no way in hell he was going to vacate his seat and take a walk outside in the sunshine and the green and the blue and the fresh if it meant he would have to abandon those legs.

His own legs were sort of pudgy and pasty and hairy.

Paul Havabier carefully clicked his mouse so that a different part of the screen altogether responded by showing some Youtube video or something. Maybe it was something from the Weather Channel. Entirely innocuous. No point in this clip having been captured at all, much less put on Youtube. And yet it had some ten-thousand views. Paul was several hundred of those views. It was just a clip of a weather person talking about a few sunny skies in a neighborhood north of Detroit. Paul had never been to Detroit. Never been to Michigan. Never been outside his own house.

Which was not strictly true, except in the sense that he only left his house, these days, to buy groceries or take out the trash or check the mailbox. Or sometimes he went to the mall to buy clothes and things and stuff for the computer. Once he left the house to get on an airplane to fly to Wisconsin, where his sister lived. She'd had a baby, and had invited him to her place for Christmas. And his parents had been there. And it was a fine time, I guess. But the very second Paul got back on the plane, back on the ground, back onto a bus, back through his front door, he was right there in front of his computer, and hadn't left it since. Not even to unpack his bag. It still sat there, by the front door, full of dirty clothes and the novels he'd been given as gifts by his family.

Everyone except his niece, who, at only 4 months old, was not very well equipped for picking out the kind of literature that Paul liked.

Paul played the clip of the weather report, and occasionally made very quick glances at the real window and the real weather that was outside. Then back to those legs. The picture of the legs was from the ankles to just above the knee. Mostly a shin shot. A shiny shin shot. Paul gazed and clicked his mouse again and started a different Youtube clip. This one was a monkey riding on the back of a dog. So damned funny!

The day continued to be nice and then turned into a sort of nice dusk and then a nice evening. Paul enlarged the picture of the legs on his desktop so that he could only see an edge of the Youtube video window. It was enough, because he only watched videos that he'd seen before. So he knew what was going on. Those two legs. The night turned into midnight and then the next day and then the next and then weeks and months and years. Paul Havabier never once moved from that chair in all that time.

Although he did, when he went to bed. And when he got up out of the chair the next day to use the bathroom. And when he was invited by some friends to have a drink at Larry's. And when he went to his job. And when he met that girl, the one he ended up married to. But besides that, never. Almost never. Once, for just a few seconds, when his wife gave birth, well, all three times. And, okay, he did go to his kids’ graduations. His eldest son became a doctor. A surgeon, to be precise. A bone surgeon, to be more precise. A bone surgeon who did bone surgeries on shiny shins, occasionally. Coincidence? Paul Havabier did not believe in coincidence.

And during all that time, all that wasted time sitting there in front of that screen staring at those shiny shins, the weather outside changed and changed and changed and changed.