My lock clicked open like the unclasping of a bra or the zipper of a skirt tapping the ground. He couldn’t resist. Minutes later, he laid me on my side in his van and sped off with me. This agitated the man’s partner, sitting in the passenger seat with his fat nose and thumbs. And as the stop signs frayed into and out of view on the road ahead, his fat nose got fatter and took in the red we passed.
“Are you crazy? You can’t ride a bike you stole in the same neighborhood where you stole it! We have to sell it.”
“I’m keeping it,” the man said. “It doesn’t look like much but it’s actually a really great bike.”
I tried to excuse the suggestion that I am less than eye-catching or that my greatness was surprising. Of course I’m a really great bike.
As testament, the man took me everywhere for several months. He was attentive to my chain, the air in my tires, the cushioned silence in my brakes. In this way, he thought we were intimate. For my part, I took him smoothly from place to place, but never bothered to learn his name. On occasion, I carried him and one other person, but mostly I carried him and things and tried to stay out of it otherwise. He once rode me home in broad daylight carrying a stolen office chair and smoking a stolen cigar.
Late one night, the man’s partner stooped down and lined up his fat nose with my stem, connecting with the eyes I don’t have. He grunted forward and rode off on me so quickly that the bit of dust between my spokes confused itself with the dust of the road.
“Wow. This actually is a really great bike,” said this asshole.
We went into the night bugs that make the darkness crawly, into the wind that soothes the crawly away. He huffed and stomped my pedals like a man reveling in the memory of how to ride.
“I’ve had it with Javier. I took all the money and I don’t even feel bad. His idiot ass is someone else’s problem now. Plus I got the bike he’s obsessed with. Damn I wish I could be there to watch him cry on the stoop,” he said into his phone.
His fat thumbs smoothed stickers onto random parts of my body to change my appearance. He bought me a wider seat to match his wider bottom, but ran his fingers along my top tube more often than he clasped my handlebars.
It wasn’t very long before I was hustled out again, late, late in the night or very early in the morning.
“Cheating shit,” she said. “I’d like to see you walk your ass to that fat whore now because your car got no headlights and I’m about to pawn your bike.”
“That’s karma,” she said.
But I’m not a car, I thought. I’m just a really great bike.