By Ulyses Razo
Outside the senior citizen center, the American flag falters in the slow wind:
I am drifting through mosquitos.
I ride toward the chiropractic center, my back beginning to ache. Their name is Many Waters. Beside the center, an abandoned pool sits. A creek runs low on water.
Feeling it harder to pedal, I look at the gear dials on each of my handles. The words power, control, and friction recur. Not feeling the results I am seeking (my hamstrings seem to be straining more than they ought) I push the dials as far as they can go. That’s when the string, controlling the gears, snaps, and from under whose skin a copper spiral, like DNA, frays.
As I ride, my father comes to jog. I hear his footsteps before I recognize his hat, the body in an all-black tracksuit. He is wearing headphones, engaged in his exercise while I sit here in my overcoat and scarf, an old man before his years, watching the silver sky, the sun no longer in sight. Earlier, the sun had shone through a pair of clouds like Saturn, its pale golden glow a substance, a being, an essence.
Riding by, I see, fleetingly, the fairgrounds, where in September each year they build the roller coasters, the well-remembered rides. I recall being with friends, all of us eight or nine. I remember us hanging upside down, finding ourselves at the height of the ring of fire, as the ride was called. At the time, something in our stomachs dropped. We knew there was only one way to go, and back then (for we were kids) we thought to ourselves that anything was better than hanging on at the peak of the ride. We wanted to fall; we wanted nothing more than to drop down and know in our guts that we weren’t kids anymore, that we were something else, something more.
There was a time when I rode my bike with a cousin who was several years my senior and on that bike ride, in a child’s ambition to beat an older brother, I rode far too fast. Rounding a bend, I fell off my bike and scraped my face across the track. Back home the following morning my parents hid all the mirrors. They didn’t want me to see my face. I knew this instantly, without their having to tell me. I knew my parents were hiding my scarred, monstrous face. The cuts eventually faded, even though I’d feared they never would. But in another sense, and from a different angle, I suppose they never did. The night it happened, when the black pebbles seared my skin, my parents warned me not to fall asleep. Stroking my hair, they said I could die.
At the edge of the oval field, near the innermost lane of the track, a cement platform sits protected by a circular structure of nets. I stop. I dismount my bike. My father runs past me as I stand here, rooted. The spot with the nets surrounding it is reserved for discus, for an ancient sport set aside for the memories of past classmates. Resuming my ride, I wonder what those boys, now men, are doing with themselves.
Beside a straight strip of track, parallel to me, a truck, it seems, is trying to race. From my perspective, it would appear that I have won. Then I see the reason: the truck is not able to drive at full speed, for behind it, attached to its rear, is a bed full of hatchets, axes, pitchforks, shears, trowels, rakes, scythes, shovels, sickles, spades. All of which are shadowed by a lawn mower and what appears to be a pile of grass and dirt. I wonder about the man’s profession and take him for an undertaker. Watching the truck go by, never to return, I focus on the black hood.
All at once the world grows dim. I dismount my cycle for the last time and cross the dying creek. Over the invisible bridge, nearing a yellow streetlamp, I follow my father home.