"The Gauntlet"

Four sprinklers sat in a row ahead of Gus, guarding the edge where sidewalk met lawn. The neighbors had arranged them so that the areas they sprinkled overlapped, but just barely, leaving no grass ungreened. Their spray tubes spat water in arcs that swept the ground like pendulums.

Gus rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt. He studied each sprinkler's motion in turn. When he was finished, he removed his glasses and tucked them into his breast pocket. Two teenage girls riding their bicycles in the street glanced at him while they cycled past.

He ducked his head and ran.

"I Think I Met My Reaper"

 

At one point when I was close to home and almost finished with my walk, I heard the sound of twigs snapping behind me. There was no one else nearby that I could see, so I kept walking. But then I heard a voice, shaky and somewhat distant, say, "Nice night for a walk, isn't it?"

I turned around. A middle-aged man in a t-shirt and shorts was riding a bike in the deepening dark, down the street I had just crossed. He was headed south, traveling from my right to my left, and only tossed me a look as he pedaled.

"It is," I called, even as I imagined walls rising up from the ground to stand between us. "Enjoy it."

The man continued pedaling, so I started to step backwards. Then, once he was almost almost out of sight, I heard him say, "Enjoy it. You never know how long it's going to last." He was gone after that, and I was left to hope that he had been talking about the weather.

"Bicycle Rider"

 

The other day, a man rode past our house on a bicycle--not an unusual occurrence, except that he was shouting to himself, and waving his hands all around as if trying to shoo away insects. 

This is what I imagine: The man is a mad conductor who views every object in sight as an instrument in his personal orchestra, whose stage--the world--is so large that he needs to travel it on a bicycle to make sure that all the players can see him. "Horns!" he shouts, and car horns blow from a nearby intersection. "Strings!" he yells, and the electrical cables overhead hum lower than a double bass. He loses himself in the music until the song ends in a final tympanic crash that leaves his bicycle a heap of crumpled metallic elements in the middle of the street.