What Counts as a Heart in a Bicycle
by Jennifer Lesh Fleck
Circus-striped streamers dazzle my handlebars. My leatherette seat wears printed roses and flourishes, like a Western saddle. I’m pretty, parked alongside my brothers and sisters. My factory paint has glitter in the pink, swirling like cosmic dust.
The village outside hunkers under June gloom, the sun an uncertainty. A stranger rolls me down a buckling sidewalk, grass struggling in salt-burdened yards. But his home is tidy brick: window boxes heavy with geraniums, a licorice-black door.
Wearing a satin bow, I meet his daughter. The room’s filled with a ruckus of children, their delighted shrieks welcoming me.
What counts as a heart in a bicycle swells with something like joy.
Her father screws on wheels in the back, so now I have four. But once the girl stops wobbling and masters balance, her mother ditches the small ones.
My girl sticks cards into my spokes for the sound: a queen of hearts, an ace of spades. She leans over the saddle, urging my pedals. Over seaside hills we zip, the playing cards clapping like applause.
We chase bandits and pop wheelies. Build ramps from scrap with her friends and catch air. Meander at sunset, ice cream dripping on my frame.
Sometimes the girl crashes. Rage-crying, she walks me home, gravel stuck to her bloody knees, new scrapes in my pretty pink.
In these days, I’m naive, believing year after year with her means forever.
My home’s now a shed, its tin roof rattling when it rains, like buckshot falling. My bumps and bangs rust, and dust dulls my glitter. I’ve lost the queen of hearts, the ace of spades still wedged tight for now.
Outside, a silver ten-speed tick-ticks by, my girl on it. No handlebar streamers, no saddle with roses.
Spiders weave chaotic nests in the place where my heart might sit, if a bicycle had one.
Next comes the place of used things. Musty sweaters, crackled china, yellowed paperbacks. Big wheels and wooden wagons move in and out. In the corner’s gloom I wait, overlooked.
Human eyes can’t make out old glitter clinging to my edges.
Eventually I’m left beside a dented can in the alley.
For years, I have new adventures, passed person to person in a camp outside town.
Nobody cares my sun-splintered paint has gone the color of terracotta. They keep my tires patched and pumped. Someone layers daisy stickers over the splits in my seat.
Here I’m useful, not loved. I have no particular owner. Each morning, we haul bags of cans into town and sacks of groceries home. Evenings, they pass smokes around a campfire, chatting into the mellow night. I glow not with glitter, but still, there’s something burnished.
It might be mistaken—were I something other than a bicycle—as the quiet pride of service.
My frame eventually warps. My brake jams.
Not from cruelty, but because my caretakers lack resources, I’m left by the roadside.
Seasons later, this reedy older boy discovers me, weeds growing lush through my spokes. Even on this hot, humid day, his sleeves are long.
In a garage, he lays out a blanket of tools and sets to work taking me apart. His hands shake, except for when he tinkers with me. Finally, the sweaty flannel shirt comes off, his bruises stark in the dusky light.
He sands away rust and alligatored paint, primes and paints me. This time I’m jet black, a star-like effect when the light hits right, like onyx.
I wish to extend similar kindnesses to him. To heal his skin, make him sound and whole. But I’m a bicycle, not some doctor or magician.
Still, there are miracles, sometimes, known even to my kind.
I’m on my back, brand new wheels in the air. My boy spins them, whistling, watching the hypnotic blur. In his inner gaze, the spokes become knives sharp enough to cut a throat. His heart thrills to this image, amid the guilty pangs.
Slowly—by osmosis and magic—I feel exactly what he feels.
Once more, his stepfather appears at the garage door, gruff and scolding. The boy shoves battered arms into sheltering sleeves, offers me his reluctant parting glance.
We only get a single ride, my boy and me—but we make it count. Pumping my new pedals, we slip and slide and streak through the streets like midnight quicksilver. Anyone seeing me now would never imagine all the bicycles I’ve been. I’m a demon-swift racer, a glittering bat out of hell guided by the hands and feet of something fierce.
This night, the man’s waiting on the driveway.
Head down, my boy ignores his stepfather’s jeers and provocations. Flipping me onto my back, he fiddles with my chain. When something inside the man finally breaks and he lunges, I’m ready. My boy leaps sideways to safety as I spin my wheels like fortune bearing down. My spokes are now knives that cut decisively and to the bone.
Everything becomes this loud, complicated blur.
The man hurls me into the bed of his work truck. Time running out, alone, he speeds towards the town center. But a half mile short, we fishtail to a stop. At the sea cliff, shaking, he lifts me high over dark waters. The lifeblood leaves him, and he stumbles, slips into bushes as I fall.
The last of my midnight glitter disappeared years ago under limpets and mussels. Sunset pink and neon green anemones congregate on my tires and soften my spokes, waving tentacles like mermaid hair. Where my ribs would be, if bicycles had ribs—a moray eel grins, weaving watery ribbons. Where my heart might sit, a tangerine sea star makes her home.
Each night from spring until autumn, the waves rocking around us go bright and bioluminescent. Watching from the pier, the children of those I’ve known and loved cry out in joy at this glow.
