Another Stephen King novella, Stationary Bike has a great premise, but gets a little too nutty even for me…
Richard Sifkitz’s doctor tells him that it’s time to lose some weight, weight that Sifkitz — a commercial artist — has been packing on since his wife died. Sifkitz buys a stationary bike, and instead of installing it in front of a TV, he puts it in his apartment’s basement, facing a blank wall (artists are weird, I guess). He paints the wall with a mural depicting a road through the woods, going from Poughkeepsie to Canada. Soon he becomes obsessed with the painting, certain that things are changing while he rides.
The other aspect to Sifkitz’s general lapse of sanity comes from his doctor. His doctor tells him to imagine his body contains a work crew that’s busting ass to process all the crap he puts into it — a visual that Sifkitz takes to heart, obsessing over these men cleaning up the road that represents his body. They eventually come together with the painting, and this evolves into a story that starts out a little creepy, and then gets just plain silly by the end.
