Years

It was dark.

The light rain, lit up like fireflies in the streetlamps, wasn't making his walk any easier either.

This is hell, he thought.

Walking down Pacific Avenue, he thought about his bicycle. The Raleigh that was far older than any bike in the garage, but not so old that he couldn't ride a dirt trail every now and then.

He looked at the rain and thought about the bike again. He wondered if the thief rode it a dozen blocks and dumped it.

Damn thief, he said out loud, into the night.

Passing ARCALL Gas, and the abandoned Safemart, he listened to the sloshing splash of his steps. He stopped, and unzipped his coat, and put the camera to his hands. Metering the scene, he pressed the shutter halfway, and judged the shutter speed. The dark was hard on the old camera, it didn't handle nighttime at all well.

Too slow on the shutter, he muttered.

The rain was getting harder, and the wind began to kick.

He tucked the lens inside his coat, to keep the rain off it. The lens cover had gone missing a week earlier, and after searching like he was looking for a lost dog, the lens cap had not been found.

Bad luck.

Or maybe the bike thief, he countered his thought, and frowned.

Normally, he would have rode the bike home from work. The same work he had rode to for the last ten years. On the same bike.

He could have hopped a bus, but he didn't feel like waiting.

Approaching Queen Street, with its golden arches and drive-thru cigarette stores, he fetched the camera from inside the shelter of his coat. As he walked, he metered the camera, and stepped into the street.

A man drove his car, gently, through the wind and rain.

I need new wiper blades, he thought, squinting to see through the black-wet darkness.

As he crossed Pacific Avenue, he squinted again.

In a flash of light, a crash to the windshield, and what horrifyingly looked like a face smothered in a yellow rain slicker, he slammed the brakes to the floor.

It had seemed as if the brakes were painfully slow to respond, but it was actually a single, clicking moment, and then he came to rest. He couldn't see through the cracked windshield, but he could hear the pitter patter rain, falling softly into the accident.

He opened his door, and stepped out into the weather, feeling like his legs were made of jello.

A million thoughts pierced his brain.

How fast had I been going?

Where was this person?

Please be alive.

He was not a man to pray. He closed the car door, and could not remember not knowing how to walk, but for a second, when he turned from the clank of the closing car door, he saw the shoes.

And he froze.

They were All-Stars, only a different color than his own black ones. These were white. And they shone bright in the raining headlamp.

He walked to the body, and turning the corner, around the bumper, he saw, in a filling pool of blood, a yellow, rain-slickered body, face-down at the front of the vehicle.

This has to be a man, he thought, judging the height against the length of the bumper.

He saw the camera upside down, lens down, and as he approached the torso, he called.

Are you okay?

Nothing.

As he picked up the man's wrist, to check for a pulse, the camera body lit up, and showed a photo.

It was a photo of his father, who rode a bicycle, and wouldn't have been in the road.

Or so he had thought.

The violent commotion of the impact, had rendered the shutter and lens together, at just the angle of the victim's face.

While he lay there dying, having a heart attack, unable to get to his father, just feet away, he wondered, Why wasn't he on his bike, in the bike lane?

Why? he thought again.

He clutched at his chest with rigormortis-like hands, stiff and past their time.

It was dark, and the rain slowed to a crawl, as if it were traffic that has nowhere to go.

The rain, like the years, had passed.

Photo by Ronald Borst