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Rattail sat at the table, drinking a glass of whole milk
and picking at his meatloaf. The cups on the table were those gingham cups, the ones
that are plastic and have a gingham pattern on them but you can still
see through them. The meatloaf was dry. His family ate off sectional plates, filled by balanced food-groups:
corn, greenbeans, biscuit, nestled into neat, monotonous partitions. Rattail often had the urge to just take out
a marker and write the food-group labels: "vegetable," "meat," grain/starch" where they always went
on the plate, night after night. So then there would be no question about it. He sometimes
wondered why his mom didn't just buy food pyramid plates, so as to completely eliminate any element
of culinary surprise. But he kept quiet about it and never asked her. He kept quiet about most stuff.
Rattail's family ate dinner the same every night
pretty much, in partitions and small talk. Like a family you see on TV
sometimes. They would ask how everyone's day was and school was and work was and
life was and be polite and, essentially, never really say anything. They ate
balanced food-groups off their sectional plates, drank milk, and minded their
P's and Q's. Like a plastic world sort of, except it was real.
Rattail never really paid
much attention to anything but getting his food eaten, so he could please
be excused and go ride his bike.
Rattail lived on his bike. For as long as he could
remember, he had been riding his bike instead of doing anything else. It was
like flying. If you could do it, you'd never stop. Every kid wants to fly, but
after a certain age sets in or a jump off the roof goes awry, most kids just
quit trying and move on to other things. Flying is left over for dreams. But you
know what? A few kids actually figure it out and don't have to just dream about
it. Rattail was one of them. His bike was wings: metal, sprocket, wings.
When Rattail was riding, he never really noticed
anything else going on in the world. He didn't have to. He could just go out and
ride around, racing down hills with his arms spread out. Into the wind. And the
world disappeared around him. He could fly, after all. What more was there?
His thing was dirt jumps. It seemed like he lived in
a world of dirt because he lived in one of those cul de sacs. But instead of
being full of identical houses and picket fences, it was full of dirt. dirt
roads. dirt sculptures. dirt houses. dirt everything. So he made jumps out of
it. And rode them a lot.
There were some kids in the neighborhood that rode
the dirt jumps too, and they were older, with trucks. So they would set up their
high beams facing the jumps and kill their batteries just so they could ride all
night in what was supposed to be darkness but wasn't. Rattail liked that idea
because he could ride forever, it felt like.
Rattail liked doing x-ups best. If you ask me, he
kinda had a natural talent for bikes and dirt jumping and stuff. a flair. You
could tell just by watching the way he rode. Everyone, even the older kids with
the trucks, watched him with respect because he was fearless and wicked smooth.
He used to charge the sketchiest jumps that nobody else would even go near and
fly off them, tilting his tricks a little off axis and keeping everything
floaty.
That's how it was till he was sixteen, at least.
X-ups into the night and flying and nothing else mattered. Yeah he used to
sometimes get crushes on girls and go to school and shit like that. But life was
still pretty much crank shafts and 360's till the year he turned sixteen.
Then things changed. He knew they would someday, but
he never really thought about it much till he had no choice. Actually, he never
really had to think about it because he rode his bike instead. You know finally
what made him think, though? Love.
One day Rattail realized he was in love with this
girl.
Her name was Dandelion. She wasn't anything special
really, even if you asked him. She had braces and freckles, wore flannel shirts
and jeans with rips in the knees and sat in font of him in modern civ class.
It started when he smelled her once by accident, one
of those times when the wind pushes someone's scent toward you and you don't
even smell them on purpose. Once he discovered that she smelled like a
combination of pears, sweat and bubblegum, he realized that he found it sort of
appealing in a weird way. And then he started smelling her on purpose. a lot.
He used to take her to this field, and they would
make out and shit and talk a little bit about stuff without really looking each
other in the eye. Afterwards, he usually had that kind of pasty feeling in his
mouth. When it got sorta late, he would walk her home hurriedly, holding her
sweaty hand in his. Then he'd run to his house, go inside and drink some five
alive, and then go ride his bike. And that's how it went for a few months.
But after a while, he didn't just have that pasty
feeling in his mouth. He had another feeling too a lot, like he was really
nervous in his chest, but in a good way. And he would hold Dandelion's hand, not
even out of obligation anymore. He would hold her hand because he wanted to and
even not want to let go sometimes.
And sometimes, after he dropped her off, he would go
home and just lay on the ground in his back yard and stare at the sky, doing
nothing instead of riding his bike. And the weird thing was that he didn't even
care anymore about not riding his bike. He would lay there and try to find the
constellations and connect them like connect the dots on Pee-Wee's Playhouse.
looking for answers maybe. and then one day it hit him that he loved that
nothing of a girl.
But you know what? Love isn't what really changed
things.
What changed things was construction work. Almost
everyone Rattail knew went into construction. Dirt construction, that is.
Uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers, friends, heroes, all dirt construction
workers. It was the big profession in those parts, basically the only
profession, besides a teacher or a doctor or civil service or some shit, that
anyone got in that dirt town. So Rattail got it too.
** ** ** ** ** ** ** *
The day he was seventeen, Rattail
moved out of his parents' house. Soon after, he married Dandelion and started working
dirt construction full time and drank beers and had bbqs on Memorial Day and only occasionally
rode his bike. Forever.
Twenty years later, he was a union guy with a beer
belly who came home with dirt under his fingernails, which he washed off with
that orange stuff that's on infomercials. He threw his kids over his shoulder
and went out to the yard and wrestled and played catch with them with those
little toys r us mitts with the Velcro. And also he bought them bikes, Schwinn
bmx's, and made dirt jumps for them. They used to race on Thursday nights at the
local track, and he would cheer them on. Until they got wives and husbands and
construction jobs of their own.
Then he had them over for dinner on special
occasions like Kwanzaa and Easter. They would eat at four thirty sharp like old
people do and talk about the latest in the news and things they saw on "that
Barbara Walters."
Sometimes he and Dandelion used to go for walks at
night to keep healthy.
Life went on like that for the next thirty years,
and Rattail lived happily ever after till the day he died.
Rattail was pretty much an ordinary guy, I bet you
think. But you know what? Rattail wasn't a guy at all; he was an ant.
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