Bicycle

I thought I would have to wait, staying up several nights in a row. I wondered if I was going to have the stamina for that, if I would fall asleep against my will. I didn’t have to find out though, because it only took a few hours. By midnight it was all over.

It wasn’t even my bike, it was Kyle’s. All of my bike bikes are stolen, along with all of my brothers bikes, so I had to beg Kyle to borrow his, and even on top of that I had to give him my Robert Mauser card, the real rare one with the red border. I knew he was going to let me borrow it though, and I bet if you ask him he knew that he was going to get it back.

Anyway, I put the bike in my back yard, leaned it against the big tree, the one that used to have that sweet branch that we would tie ropes to, before the storm broke it and it landed on my dad’s shed, and he spend the next day cursing at us and fighting with the chainsaw. Was it that storm? Is that when all the bad stuff started happening? It sort of makes sense I guess. My dad used to build all kinds of things in that shed, and we used to swing on those ropes, and life seemed straight up alright before the storm. Even if it wasn’t the storm that did it, life is for sure shit now, because our bikes keep getting stolen and we have to walk everywhere. That’s why I put Kyle's bike out back last night, why I watched it from the little hide I built inside the big raspberry bush, and why when that boy started stealing it I slit his throat. That’s why. It’s not rocket science. You go some place where your bike gets stolen all the time and you see.

Anyway, they want me to write about it, I guess the murder part mostly, they seem most concerned about that, and they keep calling it “murder” and all that, so I’ll say some stuff about that I guess, but what I really want to talk about, and what I keep thinking about most, is the bikes getting stolen. Where do they all go? What was that kid going to do with Kyle’s bike? Does he have a backyard, maybe one that the storm missed, and his branch is still up there with all those ropes, and his dad’s shed is back there filled with tools, and then there’s just this huge pile of bikes he keeps piling more onto each night? I doubt that’s right. I bet it’s something different, maybe something I can know even, if they try to tell me, and I do want to know. To be honest though, whatever it is they tell me, assuming they tell me anything at all, it doesn’t matter, the reason for any of this doesn’t matter, not at all—I was going to slit the throat of the next person to steal a bike, simply, and that was that.