The Gooey Bicycle

A bicycle is made out of goo.

Every kid remembers their first bicycle. My bike wasn't the same as the other kids'. It was all gooey. It was pink and purple and the handlebars were slimy and damp, which made it a lot more difficult to ride, and you could only ride it at night, which was dangerous. My parents had to wear rubber gloves in order to help me and I would have to shower three times after I rode it to get all the gunk off. The girls in my neighbourhood were completely grossed out by my bicycle that I rode around the oblong-shaped island that my house was on.

Like any other bike, my bike had its problems. I reiterate: my bike was very different, so its problems weren't that the chain kept coming off or the wheels got punctures, it was that every now and again, out of the ends of the handle bars, jets of green flame would shoot out, like there were tiny dragons in them. As a result of this I had to keep wide berths as I rode, sticking to wide open streets and car parks. This all-but ruled out riding through alleyways, where any people I encountered would almost certainly have gotten burnt should I have tried to ride past them. Whenever I could not avoid going through a narrow space, my hands trembled as I hoped that the flames would not set me off balance and cause me to crash into the wall.

As I got better and better at riding the gooey bicycle, it got gradually harder, and the jets of flame got smaller and smaller, until all that came out were puffs of smoke. The bike's appearance also improved and became shiny, not glossy because of the slime, but shiny, like metal. Riding the bike became kind of boring after that. Even though it was of course a lot easier to ride and the girls didn't gawk in horror at it anymore, it didn't feel the same as when it was all gooey and barely held together by dripping strands and weak tendons of disgusting goo. For some reason, riding a gooey bike was so much more exhilarating than riding a normal bike. It was a one of a kind bike, and I had the only one like it in the entire neighbourhood. I guess it couldn't help changing. Still, a large part of me wished I had never learned to ride that bike so that it was left as the gooey bicycle that I loved.

When I was old enough to drive, I picked the gooeyist car I could find, and my experience learning to drive it was just like with the gooey bicycle. The gears slid like the bones of a slow roasted pig in an umbrella stand. People threw up when they saw me driving this hunk of putrid, festering so-called "machinery" on the street, and the jets of flame, bigger, of course, than those of the bicycle, blasted out of the holes in the hubcaps, meaning I had to be very careful when driving along a road where other motorists were around, being especially weary of cyclists, who did not have any protection against the flames. It felt very unstable to drive, so, as I did with the bicycle, I drove in car parks and on deserted roads until the flames died down.

The car, as expected, gradually became hard the more I drove it, but this time I didn't make the same mistake as I had with the bike. At the first hint of stability, as soon as I saw that its tendons were connecting and the goo was sliding and getting colder and more shiny, I jumped out of the car as I was driving on a steep hill, and I watched it roll down, getting less and less hard on its way back to its original goo state, the whole thing melting and coming apart as it got further and further away from me, the wheels sliding off and eventually coming to a complete stop as dark purple puddles, until what was now an amorphous ball of goo entered at break-neck speed into the busy cross-section at the bottom of the hill and splattered against the side of a truck, the driver barely realising that a car had just ran right into the side of him. A tiny drop of the gunk flew in through the window and landed on the truck driver's forehead, which he wiped off, thinking it was rain.

It was one heck of a ride.

Reviews

[De-personalize Yourself]

What in the hell did I just read

[De-personalize Yourself]

I meant that in the nicest way possible, of course xox

[groisht]

Thanks a lot sideways lady! It's about goo and bicycles and their relationship to each other in this world.

[De-personalize Yourself]

You're quite welcome, moustache boy! Ahhhh, it makes perfect sense now, thank you for clarifying. Ha! xox