A tangy yellow sun weaves warm tendrils around the umbrella of oak leaves, spreading a glaze of daylight on the sidewalks and homes in my new neighborhood. I get out of my car to check the mail. As I’m heading back toward the front door, a guy biking with his baby kid strapped to his abdomen starts to brake for me. I wave him through. He goes on his merry way.
He says “I appreciate it.”
I say, “You too!”
My day is already formidable. You too.
I appreciate it.
You too.
You.
Too.
It echoes in my head like the memory of my own death. For the next few numb minutes of walking through my house, I’m stumbling like a drunk, tripping over the memory of my words.
Maybe he’ll think I meant “I appreciate you braking for me.”
I’m sure he doesn’t. I’m sure he just knows that I didn’t really listen before responding. Maybe he’s still thinking about me.
But something sobers me. A thought like a bolt through the ankle. This guy riding his bike had his kid on the front of the bike and not the back. I am uneasy.
Could it just be that I’m not used to seeing it? Or is it just that it’s a Newtonian death trap and a front row seat to A-grade body horror?
Scenario 1: Bike Daddio falls forward. He hits a big elevation change in the sidewalk. He runs over a very powerful and cursed stone. Whatever it is, the bike goes full-stop and sends him on a faceplant trajectory with the sidewalk.
If he DOES fall forward, the kid will be turned into mush under his jaw. The big blue seat will cushion his mouth nicely. He’ll be left with nary a scratch. But he’ll have the displeasure of hearing and feeling the little head do a bony squish on the concrete. How fucking awful is that? What if the kid dies? Will he hear it forever? Will he remember it forever? Where the soft kid-head just went putty-like on the concrete?
But the kid had a helmet, right? If she had a helmet, would that protect her from patriarchal physics?
I don’t know much about little noggins. Maybe they’re strong like stone. Maybe they can’t be turned to squishy nothing that easily.
If he falls back, I guess the kid is alright but who the fuck falls backward on a bike? Who can manage that? It ain’t a fuckin’ horse, rearin’ and all that. It’s just a bike.
Scenario 2: He gets home fine. The kid is fine. He does a tea party with her, or something. They make tea together and eat ice cream with their mother, who he personally preserved and keeps about the house in a simulacra of life before he killed her in a horrific bike-on-bike accident.
Who knows where life will take us? Who knows what a clam does when it’s closed?