At the edge of town, there is a pile of bicycles. Some are racers – some are cruisers, all discarded. Some are black and some are white and some are green. But one thing they all have in common. They were made out of the bones of coyotes and oak wood.
Thunk-Thunk. Thunk-Clunk.
A woman rides one of these beauties over the freight train tracks.
She is surveying the scene. Roaming with the spirits unaware. Back in the empty town. There is no one here. There hasn’t been anyone for years. Returning. For what? Where do I go now? Which streets hold the memory of that boy I was going to marry? And the children I used to teach?
Memory sets upon the buildings and streets like dust.
She pedals faster to stir up the dust with the wind.
To stir up a cloud over memory for a moment.
The town bar doors swing open with the wind as she passes, and she sees within a group of stragglers and strangers with horrible faces. There are little ones with hungry bodies. Men with cuts. Women with bruises. There is no speech. Their sense of motion is weirdly minimal. It is unclear if they are alive or dead. Do they simply have nothing to do and are like this all the time? Or has something just happened out of the ordinary to make them so sober and lifeless? Or has the memory of one sudden tragedy left them in an ongoing state of paralyzed remembrance?
She stops past the bar, and, dismounting the bike, turns to go in. The bartender is tough with age and loss, and stares with an expression of love or anger at her as she approaches. Something in her stomach spins rapidly as he looks into her. She scans the room quickly to find families, a wide assortment of people, sitting and staring some at each other, some at her, some out the window, and some down at their bourbon – children on the floor playing with things. The slow pace of time suddenly rushes into dread as she recognizes these people. They are all hers. All of them were hers. The children to whom she would have given birth if the accident had not happened. The children in her classroom every day before the accident. The babies of the children. Her mother and father there. And her younger sisters. The accident.
The bartender gestures with his hand for her to take a seat. Instead of sitting, she takes his hand, climbs up on the counter, pulls him up, and begins to dance lazily to the rhythm of the door swinging back and forth and the melody whittled by the wind. Eyelids slowly lift with eyebrows. The flesh and hair and eyeballs and clothes of the people begin to flicker in her vision. Patches of color dissolve and disappear. The familiar fades.
As she pedals again, the mirror on her handlebars catches her eye, and she looks at herself with the main street shapes in the background. She surveys herself. Her face is the same as the people she just left behind. Alive or dead? She grabs at the mirror and pounds it once with a fist. She loses some balance and then regains it. The mirror has swiveled around but does not budge.
She keeps riding till she comes to the opposite edge of town, and merges onto a wider road. The billboards beguile her with smiling offers. Walmart. Insurance. Casino. The trees wave easily in the sun, proud and green. For miles, there are no other vehicles on the road. The sky is dyed blue.
As the blue darkens, her pedaling slows. Suddenly, she presses the brakes, gets off her bicycle, and walks through the grass on the roadside. On impulse, she lies down in the damp grass. As she falls asleep, she hears a voice begin to sing. The sound of the voice is filled with grief and understanding and hope, and she stirs gently, dreams filled with restless love.
Story by Jonathan Kotulski
joyfuldissident
k
Ian North
