Popping Wheelies
When I ride my bike, I put my phone in the other room. I feel guilty. I feel its hot eye as I turn my back. I feel it reaching for my taillights as they drop below the horizon. I do it anyway. This is the underrated advantage of feeling guilty no matter what you do.
When I ride my bike, I proclaim my faith that the infrastructure will remain intact outside my supervision for twenty minutes. My vermicelli legs can’t pedal any longer than that. The Pope and the Pentagon have a few other people they will call before me. I am stationed near the bedroom window, with a clear view of any incoming horsemen. While I ride, my boss may ask me for this month’s numbers, and my friend Bertha may text to ask if I think it’s OK to eat Egg Beaters that expired yesterday. I will get back to them in twenty-one minutes. I will apologize.
When I ride my bike, my body and I share the same room. We do not have much in common. Conversation is torturous. My interests include crocheting cat blankets and speculating on the Enneagram types of Lord of the Rings characters. Meanwhile, she is always talking about rivers and the moon. But when I spin, we commiserate. We sit across my lungs from each other. She keeps me upright. I promise her I will get outside while the dogwoods are still in bloom. For some reason that is important to her. She thinks I should get a bike that goes outside. I tell her we have already had that discussion.
When I ride my bike, I keep good company by watching videos. On a screen the size of a graham cracker, jocular vicars tell me we all make God too small. Women in purple pray without a script. Sometimes I watch other people receive bread and wine. Sometimes I watch a man named The Rock consume his “cheat day breakfast.” I watch enough news to tug the Great Mercy’s hem. I spend tens of minutes of my only life watching tutorials about eyebrows. I watch experts froth over this season’s essential color. (It is pistachio.) I watch women who could be my daughter promise me it is fine if I never have children. I watch Coney Island rats consume toaster strudels.
When I ride my bike, I sit as close as I will get to a reflective surface all day. This is by necessity, not desire. In a condo sized for a midweight gerbil, there was nowhere else to station the bike. Some deranged wit covered my closet in mirrors. I cannot escape my 44-year-old neck or kindergartener bangs no matter how fast I pedal, so I take intentional peeks. There I am. Some mornings I almost pass for 43. When the Holy Ghost is flying low, I can convince myself I look like my mother. Most days I look bewildered. This proves the adage that everyone ends up with the face that they deserve. I smile at the closet until I feel protective of that spinning creature. I forget that I feel guilty. The timer pings twenty minutes.
Angela Townsend
Angela Townsend is an eleven-time Pushcart Prize nominee, twenty-one time Best of the Net nominee, five-time Best Small Fictions nominee, and the winner of West Trade Review's 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Blackbird, Five Points, Fourth Genre, The Iowa Review, JMWW, The Offing, SmokeLong Quarterly, trampset, and Witness. She works for a cat sanctuary and is a graduate of Vassar College and Princeton Theological Seminary.