Doubling

Michael

He speaks slowly, an artifact of his extensive experience with various substances. His mustache quivers a little when he speaks. He smiles broadly on purpose, both hamming the gesture while also generous. His eyes crinkle. His voice tightens and pitches up when he's frustrated. His teeth are a bit rough. His sense of style has been earned with experimentation, it communicates "I'm hip, definitely comfortable, and colorful." He is sober. He is a poetry nut, but has a very plain and literal disposition in the world. Utterly bald. Broad-thighed. Strange nodules throughout his body. Proud of where he's from. Loves a meal out, a show out. Time alone is just as good. AA all day. Bike life sans brakes--so what's the healthy living for? Perhaps afraid, but I haven't seen it. Believes in the destruction of capitalism, quietly and fervently. Holds the mad and the sad while forgiving from the first ask.

Great Uncle George

He's a tall-tale-teller. You should hear about the time he biked across the country in 23 days on a 3-speed, nevermind the current (thumps chest) robust capacity of his 'windbags'. Windbags indeed, George. His pride in his garden is entirely justified. Well, mostly justified. You can't shake his faith in homecooked agricultural hacks (footies for apples keep apple maggots at bay?) and he's famously stingy. A crutch to the elbow on each arm. Great round chest, though it always seems as stout as a barrel beneath his tired overalls. He squints. His hair is combed back. Is incapable of forgetting a debt owed him, seems to forget the debts he owes others, but all those debts sum to a fabric between households. Harsh to his own children to a reproachable degree, but tended for towards the end of his life by his most challenged daughter.

Arthur

Arthur's hair had thinned out to a sparse veil across his pate by the time he was thirty five, but remained perplexingly dark. The mustache followed the opposite track, a lurking phantom until middle age, when it burst into bloom. Now, at fifty, his upper lip would make a walrus green. It was a thick mustache, if a bit unkempt. The longer scraggle hairs shivered when he'd laugh his barking laugh. Great curtain though it was, it couldn't conceal the tight curling of his smile when he was telling a story of his youth, freshly invented for everyone's benefit. I must have heard a dozen explanations for that cane, his bad knee. Was it the left? Thinking on it now, the bad knee might have swapped legs a couple times. My favorite was the bicycle crash. Arthur had been drinking at his friend's wedding, see, and was hardly ready for the night to conclude just because the newlyweds were leaving the reception to consummate. He called those faithful to Bacchus together, and they decided on the Riverside Taproom, a few miles down road. Arthur was in no state to drive, but luck provided a rusted mess of a bicycle next to the reception venue, nevermind the severed chain and brake cables! Arthur's shoelace stood brave substitute for the missing links and off he careened into the night. In his eagerness, he had set out ahead of the bride and groom, and before long they were rolling up behind him. Arthur turned to wave, the groom slammed the brakes, Arthur tried to reverse pedal and slow, but the shoelace abandoned him. Ass over teakettle. Neither Arthur's ilium nor his friendship with the groom ever recovered. "And that sonofabitch still owes me a bicycle!"