A Collection of Short Stories

The Bicycle

 Outside on our porch sits an old, rusty, red bicycle. Nobody knows how long it has been there, sitting like a sentinel guard outside our front door. The seat is a faded, brown leather that is somehow always dry, despite the storms we frequently get out here. The chains are all rusted beyond use, but the red paint coating the metal frame is somehow perfectly intact. Nobody likes to touch the red bicycle. The animals always walk in a wide arc around it when exiting the house, eyeing it warily as they hurry past. And even the spiders don't spin their webs on it.

There was one time when one of the cats almost touched it. Molly was her name, a brown tabby with long fur who always wanted her head to be scratched. She was lumbering out of the house, making her way towards my cousins and I who were sitting on the porch. We were laughing and talking about the school year we had just finished up, when we heard a frightened yelp behind us and saw Molly leap into the air. The poor cat landed and dashed off the porch, making a beeline for the open barn doors. The three of us looked at each other, totally perplexed, and then looked at the bicycle. There was nothing there that would have harmed her, causing her reaction. We could not locate the source of her distress. We didn't even think she was that close to the bicycle when she freaked out, maybe a foot or so away. It was then that my cousin John dared me to touch the bicycle. I realized that in all my twelve years of living in this house, I had never touched the thing. I don't think anyone had. I accepted the dare with little worry. Why would I be afraid of a rusty old bicycle?

I almost can't describe what I felt when I went to touch it. Within a foot of the thing, nobody had ever dared get that close, this buzzing feeling started up in my skin. It was like electricity was running through my veins, like the feeling of touching an electric fence, only on a lesser scale. I paused here, letting the current pass through me, but I was egged on by my cousins. I reached out my hand, but paused about an inch from the handlebars. It was then that a new feeling washed over me, one much more powerful than the first.

Ice filled my veins, replacing the humming currently that had lived inside them under a minute ago. It sent a cold shock to my heart that caused me to stagger backwards. The feeling didn't leave until I was a few feet away from the bicycle, almost against my cousins chest's, when it suddenly vanished. I spun around, a shocked and scared look on my face. Tom heckled me for not actually touching it, and John called me a pussy for getting so scared by a dumb old bicycle. I tried to tell them what had happened, something that would explain Molly's bizarre reaction, but they didn't listen. They were both fifteen, three years older than me, so I was irrelevant to them, and I'm guessing that was part of why they dismissed my story.

It's been two years since the incident with the bicycle. It's still there, sitting in the exact same place on the front porch. Everyone is still too afraid to touch it, or to move if off the porch. Everyone acts like they don't care, like it doesn't scare them. But still, when dared, they all refuse to touch it. Even John and Tom, who made fun of me when I wouldn't touch it, won't go near it.