The Boy
In a blue collar city, set in the shadow of the Tower of Peace, lived the Boy. The OPEC crisis was still making headlines as he moved there, to a simple plex erected at the very end of a cul-de-sac. Not a meticulously planned cul-de-sac – this was the kind of cul-de-sac where the builders just stopped building, as the wastelands beyond would make things just too difficult for them. Thus, the street ended with no proper end. Such was this city. A collage of buildings and streets going nowhere, scattered under a paper mill’s dubious clouds. To this very day, the street still ends with no proper end. Not even a sign was erected; it just ends, from pavement to dust to wastelands.
The Boy would ride his red banana-seat CCM, the one named after a Coupe, itself named after an unmentionable adult past time, pedaling from the end of that deep cul-de-sac to venture out there, away from the street that ended with no proper end. And there she was, beyond the sharp left. The boy skidded to a halt, his redline tire leaving a mark on the pavement. Those lines. Those impossibly deep wheels. That long hood, short deck, and that stance – as if she was ready to leap out of the cul-de-sac. Her rubber daggers clung to their chromed shields, just like the Lady, herself a product of the past, desperately clung to the present. She had aura. She had too much class for a town where extended leaf spring shackles were the norm, not the exception.
The Boy would stare at the Lady every time he passed by her. And every time he did, she was always looking beyond the cul-de-sac, always ready to drive out of there, to a better world. When the Boy moved out of the street that ended with no proper end, she was still there, and at the same time she was no more, as her last sibling had wheeled into the daylight, past a dusty factory’s doors, in a very far place, far beyond the Tower of Peace. Before the Boy would become the Teen, her maker joined her, now but a footnote in the great book of history, forever a part of the past.
To be continued
