A tall skinny boy in a burgundy shirt and brown trousers is crouching over a dusty bicycle with a deep red frame and chrome handlebars, his fingers blackened with grease, tendons shifting beneath sun-kissed forearms as he eases the back wheel from its frame with a wrench. His vertebrae protrude slightly, small hills swelling up and down again along the curvature of his back. I’m steadying the bike with one hand; the metal is cold and there is a thin silhouette of mist on its surface, condensation from my sticky palm. I watch him but he is oblivious to my presence, hair falling over his eyes in which are reflected, I imagine, rusty spokes, gleaming dully. His fingers tremble with concentration as they prise the tyre away from the rim. I feel strangely voyeuristic; as though in watching him I am intruding on some private, intimate ceremony between man and bicycle. He peels back the cracked Michelin tyre to reveal the inner tube, soft and prone like a slug suddenly exposed beneath a lifted stone. I avert my eyes, gazing out the window instead; dove-grey clouds against blinding white.
I am going to write a story of some variety, long or short, fictitious or factual, every single day for a year. Wish me luck.
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