Try anyway

At nine twelve a.m., Dennis Larch, fifty-two, died in Conference Room B of the Bexley Municipal Annex during the push-up module of the Cretaceous Physical Fitness Test, a wellness assessment required for employees applying to transfer into the Parks Department benefits tier.

The form described the test as inclusive.

This was the first warning.

Inclusive is a word institutions use when they have not changed the door but have painted a wider door on the wall beside it.

Mr. Larch was a municipal records clerk. He had been a municipal records clerk for twenty-three years, eight months, and, according to his desk calendar, six working days. He knew the annex before the annex knew itself. He knew which basement cabinets swelled in August, which drawer stuck after rain, which council minutes had been misfiled during the copier replacement of two thousand nine, and which zoning maps were technically superseded but still more accurate than the digital version no one trusted and everyone pretended to use.

He was not fast.

He was not modern.

He was necessary.

Dennis Larch had a long tail, heavy hips, a forward-leaning posture, and the patient expression of a creature who had outlived several categories of weather. Children stared at him in grocery stores until their parents told them not to stare, after which the parents stared worse. He wore short-sleeved button-down shirts in pale colors, wide suspenders, and municipal shoes ordered from a catalog that specialized in nurses, postal workers, and men who stood all day near printers.

His desk was in Records, between the plat cabinets and the wall where retired office equipment went to become archaeology.

On his desk were three sharpened pencils, a stamp pad, a jar of paper clips sorted by size, a photograph of his sister Elaine and her son Milo at a county fair, and a small sign reading:

PLEASE DO NOT MOVE FILES FROM THIS COUNTER UNLESS YOU ARE DENNIS OR HAVE BECOME DENNIS THROUGH LEGAL PROCESS.

No one knew who had made the sign.

Dennis denied it with insufficient force.

He was good at his job in ways that had become difficult to measure. He remembered that the cemetery expansion permit had been filed under Public Works instead of Burial Grounds because the mayor at the time did not like the word burial. He knew that Larkspur Lane and Old Larkspur Road were different places, and that confusing them had once resulted in a gazebo being approved in a drainage ditch. He knew where the original floodplain maps were kept, even after a consultant renamed the folder FLOODPLAIN_FINAL_NEW_ACTUAL_USE_THIS_ONE_v7.

He had saved the city from embarrassment many times.

The city expressed its gratitude by inviting him to a wellness assessment.

Dennis did not want to leave Records because he disliked Records.

He wanted dental.

This is important.

There are dreams people admit to and dreams people disguise as paperwork. Dennis had a molar on the lower left side that had begun to ache during cold weather and budget hearings. His current plan covered cleanings, X-rays, and the suggestion of sympathy. The Parks Department benefits tier covered crowns after a waiting period.

It also paid slightly more.

His rent had gone up twice in three years. The landlord called the increases "market alignment," a phrase Dennis wrote on an envelope and underlined once, not because he admired it but because he wanted evidence of what language could do when unsupervised.

He did not imagine himself joyfully working in Parks. He imagined checking permit logs, maintaining tree-removal records, updating trail-closure notices, and answering questions from people who believed public land became private if their dog liked it.

This seemed manageable.

Then Human Resources sent the packet.

WELLNESS COMPLIANCE PATHWAY FOR INTERDEPARTMENTAL TRANSFER APPLICANTS.

Inside were sixteen pages, three signatures required, a liability waiver, a chart of acceptable resting heart rates, and a section titled FUNCTIONAL FITNESS BENCHMARKS FOR FIELD-ADJACENT ROLES.

Dennis read the phrase field-adjacent several times.

Records was not field-adjacent. Records was adjacent to the vending machine.

But the Parks Department was field-adjacent, and the transfer required completion of the assessment. The assessment included a timed walk, a grip test, a flexibility reach, a step platform, and the push-up module.

Dennis circled the push-up module in pencil.

Then he erased the circle because he did not want the paper to know.

For two weeks, Dennis prepared.

He watched instructional videos at home with the volume low. The people in the videos were encouraging and mammalian. They said things like engage your core and stack your wrists under your shoulders. Dennis looked at his wrists. Then he looked at his shoulders. Between them lay several million years of disagreement.

He bought a resistance band from a sporting goods store. The cashier asked if it was for rehab. Dennis said, "In a sense."

He practiced in his living room after moving the coffee table, two dining chairs, and a ceramic umbrella stand shaped like a heron. The heron had belonged to his mother and had survived three moves and one incident involving Milo and a foam sword. Dennis did not want to crush it during self-improvement.

The first night, he lowered himself toward the carpet and remained there, thinking.

The second night, he found that his tail struck the radiator unless angled through the kitchen doorway.

The third night, his downstairs neighbor knocked on the ceiling with a broom.

Dennis wrote her an apology note.

He did not mention push-ups.

At work, he kept a sticky note inside the Wellness Compliance packet:

Ask HR about alternate assessment.

He carried the sticky note for five days.

On the sixth day, he went to Human Resources.

The HR generalist was named Kayla. She had a kind face, a severe badge lanyard, and the exhausted optimism of a person asked to enforce rules she had not written. Dennis liked Kayla. Kayla had once found him a chair without arms for the annual benefits meeting.

Dennis asked whether an alternate assessment existed.

Kayla opened three windows on her computer, frowned at all of them, and said the form did not have an exemption field.

Dennis said he was not asking for an exemption.

Kayla said, "Right."

Dennis said he was asking for an alternate measurement of functional capacity.

Kayla said, "Right."

Then she said the form did not have that either.

They looked together at the screen.

There are moments when two decent people stand on opposite sides of a stupid thing and cannot move it.

The morning of the test, Dennis arrived early.

He wore gray athletic pants, his municipal shoes, and a Parks Department T-shirt Kayla had given him in a bag with the packet, though the shirt had been designed for a torso less historically complicated than his. Across the front, in green letters, it said:

BEXLEY PARKS: ROOM TO MOVE.

Dennis had read this in the mirror and decided not to think about it.

Conference Room B had fluorescent lights, a long folding table pushed against the wall, a whiteboard bearing the ghost of a previous budget meeting, and a motivational poster showing a mountain no one in Bexley had visited. On the table were paper cups, a sign-in sheet, liability forms, clipboards, and a bowl of bananas for after.

Dennis saw the bananas and felt unexpectedly moved.

He had brought his own lunch in a brown paper bag. Turkey sandwich. Apple. Antacid tablets. Rent-renewal notice, because he had opened the mail while making breakfast and placed it in the bag by mistake. Or not by mistake. Sometimes a person carries the thing he is trying to escape without noticing.

The wellness contractor was a man named Brad who had calves like punctuation and a watch that kept congratulating him. Brad was not cruel. He was worse for this scene: cheerful, efficient, laminated.

He called each module by name.

Timed walk.

Grip strength.

Flexibility reach.

Step platform.

Dennis performed better than expected in the timed walk, worse than expected in flexibility, and unusually well in grip strength after Brad said, "Just do what you can," in a tone Dennis found motivating for reasons Brad did not deserve.

Then came the push-up module.

The instructions were read aloud from the packet.

Hands shoulder-width apart.

Back straight.

Lower body until elbows reach ninety degrees.

Return to starting position.

Brad demonstrated.

This did not help.

The other applicants watched with the careful non-looking of coworkers near embarrassment. A man from Public Works studied the ceiling tile. A woman from Parks adjusted her shoelace for longer than the shoelace required. Kayla stood by the door holding a clipboard against her chest.

Dennis got down on the mat.

This took time.

Time should not humiliate a person, but in public it often does.

He placed his hands where Brad indicated. His claws made faint sounds against the mat. His tail extended behind him, crossed the taped boundary, and nudged the leg of the folding table. The table shuddered. The bananas rolled in their bowl.

Someone reached to steady them.

Dennis said, "Sorry."

No one should have let him say sorry.

He began.

The first descent was not a push-up in the technical sense, but it was a considerable act of faith. His elbows bent. His shoulders trembled. His body, built for another arrangement of trees, weather, hunger, and time, tried to obey a municipal instruction printed in twelve point font.

Brad said, "Good effort."

Dennis did not want effort.

He wanted completion.

He pressed upward. For a moment, it seemed possible. His back lifted. One knee dragged. His tail struck the folding table again, harder this time. A clipboard fell. The banana bowl tipped. Brad stepped forward. Kayla said his name.

Dennis lowered his head, not in shame exactly, but in concentration.

Witnesses later disagreed about whether he completed one push-up.

The form would have said no.

This is why forms are not invited to funerals.

At nine twelve, Dennis collapsed on the mat in Conference Room B.

The official cause was cardiac arrest.

The contributing causes were not listed.

They were rent, dental pain, institutional language, a missing exemption field, and the ancient loneliness of being asked to become measurable in the wrong way.

Dennis Larch died before the ambulance reached the municipal annex. The bananas remained on the floor until Kayla picked them up one by one and put them back in the bowl, though no one ate them afterward.

He is survived by his sister, Elaine; by his nephew Milo, who said Dennis was "the old kind of strong"; by the Records Department; by Kayla in Human Resources, who has since submitted a revision request to the wellness vendor; by three cabinets of municipal maps no one else fully understands; and by a ficus plant near the permit window that Dennis watered every Tuesday because the sunlight there was deceptive.

In his desk drawer, under the paper clips, Elaine found the sticky note.

Ask HR about alternate assessment.

It had been crossed out.

Below it, in Dennis's careful handwriting, he had written:

Try anyway.