Free The Night Cyclist by Stephen Graham Jones

 
    There must be no compulsion to hide the bodies. Otherwise I’d have never found them.
    It was a Tuesday night.
    I was riding home after work, my leather roll of knives strapped across my back. I’d left my apron on the hook at the restaurant, but I still smelled like the kitchen. Before Doreen had moved out two months ago, she’d jokingly accused me of having a series of affairs at work, and that I was trying to mask the scent of all those other women with garlic and turmeric. It had been funny, a running joke, at least until the new sous-chef needed me to walk her through cleanup again after hours, and then leaned back into me while I was reaching around her to demonstrate where the fryer basket clicked in.
    I had been with Doreen four years, then. And the sous-chef—what the cheating man says in stories is that she didn’t mean anything. But that’s not right. That’s not fair. What she meant for me, it was a way out.
    So far, this is how my life’s gone, pretty much. I do all this work to build a thing—in this case trust, a relationship, someone to watch stupid television with, someone who lets me sleep late because chefs keep different hours—and then, once the Jenga tower gets tall enough to look a little bit scary, I start pulling out blocks, seeing how far I can skeletonize my life before it all comes crashing down again.
    Taking the bike paths home each night after work, though, it reminds me that I wasn’t always like this. There was a time. It was college. I was on the racing team. The university was buying us the latest bikes, sleek things, bullets with wheels—we weighed them in grams—and the sponsors were supplying us with the same shorts and helmets and gloves and glasses the pros wore, and every day my legs were pumping, pushing, pedaling. That was the only time I hadn’t started pulling out blocks, as it were. If college had lasted forever, I’d still be out riding, just zoning out at forty miles per hour, choosing the line I was going to take, just like Coach was always saying. You have to choose your line.
    Coming home at two in the morning, Velcroed into my old racing shoes that have the clips worn down to nubs—dull little nubs my pedals know like a ball knows its socket—I could pretend that life had never ended. That I was still me. That I hadn’t run Doreen off on purpose. That I wouldn’t run the next Doreen off just the same.
    All the other kitchen staff who biked in and out, their bikes were these bulky hybrids. Some were even labeled “comfort.”
    The comfort in riding—it’s not physical, it’s spiritual.
    My bike’s built for racing, still and always. Aggressive stance, the bars dialed low so you have to lie down on the top tube, pretty much. A butt-floss saddle canted forward like I’m a time trial racer.
    The only concession to middle age, I suppose, is the light clamped to the handlebars. It makes me feel old, but I’d feel older if I endo’d into the creek. The trail between the restaurant and my apartment is lit up intermittently, these pale yellow discs you kind of float through, but there are plenty of long, dark tree-tunnels over those two and a half miles. Those tunnels are fun to shoot in the dark, don’t get me wrong, but the dark isn’t the thing to worry about.
    The whole year, there’d been a battle going on in the opinion pages of the newspaper. Motorists were bullying bikers, bikers were kicking dents into fenders and doors. Nobody’d been hurt too bad yet, but it was coming. One of us was going to get nudged a bit too hard by a bumper, nudged hard enough to get pulled under the car, and the motorist was going to walk for it like they always do, and then cyclists were going to be riding side by side from one ditch to the other, stopping traffic for miles.
    It had happened before, and it was happening again. Even up in the mountains.