She wheeled and glided through forest and flatland, entranced and married to the concept of longevity. Her greatest love. Millions of years from now, mankind would look back and see her flying through a grove and over a bridge, or downtown where the thunder of the automobile put up a stink and clouded the electric lights overhead. The lights of forever.
My car will kill you, the bumper sticker read.
The old man smiled at her, a pair of Chicklets for teeth poking out of his head. His age-old and wizened face a little dirty from sleeping on a park bench. Her dreams were fairly mundane but the old man’s smiling face as she rode by reminded her of chewing on her teeth in the dream world, as they popped out of her gums like so many Tic-Tacs and rolled around in her mouth. She chomped down, one after the other, like half-busted kernels and always awoke in stark early-morning horror. There is some knowledge in milk deficiency and brittle bones.
The old man with Tic-Tac teeth smiled at her again as she passed by and wizards never looked as old, she thought. His shirt had an ancient white circle on it and his head bore no hair except for the thin, white strands of wispy fiber poking from behind his ears. He was soil farmed too much and never rotated. Dried-out and never used.
Dodging a fallen branch, she pedaled a little farther until she came to a gazebo where she parked her bike and took off her helmet. She rinsed her face with cold water from a fountain and dabbed it with her own shirt even as the 90-degree heat filled her face with a perennial caress of a summertime sponge. She sat on a picnic table in the shade and drank from her almost empty water bottle. Water healed the body and kept it alive and moving. The more you drank the longer you lived, somebody once told her, and she knew it was a crock, but she still drank water every day.
People said weird stuff like that, but Cabbie always remembered the dying stuff because of the permanent impression. It was like telling somebody they were a crappy writer. You are attacking their personality. That is to say, dying was as much of somebody’s psyche as their personality. The need to drive forward was as much as your own feelings in regard to success. The meaning to life, then, was the urgency that death provides. Get it done before you’re dead, and at least try to get good at whatever it is you set out to accomplish.
Summer was almost over and the heat had just arrived. Already the leaves were turning and the daytime was losing its fortitude—its constitution weak and brittle under the cunning hands of the coming dark. Six months of cold for an unfair exchange rate of short, vibrantly green summers. She often thought that the summer should drink more water to live longer, but it always failed to sound compelling, and she made it a point to bypass such thoughts. Homeopathic remedies and such.
In the warm summer air and startling sunshine, she watched a neighbor walk her dog in the languid heat, and both dog and owner looked just as gassed.
“Hello, Mr. Henry,” she said.
“Hey, Cabbie,” he replied and stopped, holding the dog by its leash.
He added, “Did you finish your essay?” and the look in his eyes said he didn’t even know if he knew.
Such was the life of a teacher, Cabbie Thought. But she had watched him work into the wee hours while she took part in the newspaper club. Leaving school at 7 pm some nights, she could only sense how much longer he had to stay, even as she and her fellow classmates ran out the door to the local DQ.
“Yea, yea, you bet,” she said and she didn’t even know if that was true. All she knew is that it was slow going on an essay about life after death that Mr. Henry had tried to stop her from writing. Well, not tried to stop her, but really pushed her on a different topic. She would not relent.
She trusted Mr. Henry’s judgement, as he had stayed late to grade papers, but he had also stayed late to tutor her and others in the finer points of essay writing. He had said she had a gift but didn’t know how to use it just yet. Well, he didn’t say it in those exact words, but it was a really nice thing to say to keep her motivated.
As it turns out, the essay was bad.
Later, in just a few weeks, he held her after class and asked her a variety of questions, ending with, “It sounds like a rant. It’s just angry.”
She shrugged, but deep down it was her beliefs on the page. How dare he say that she ranted? She liked Mr. Henry, but now she hated him passionately. How dare you? You look and can’t read. You spent time criticizing and no time analyzing, you weak-willed scum. Good day, Mr. Henry.
“You can rewrite it, and I will reassess your grade,” he said.
She nodded and smiled. “Okay,” but she never rewrote it and she took the grade. A D+ and that’s where it stayed because life was long and looking ahead, it mattered more to be principled than to be corrected. As it turned out, life was much shorter than she could have imagined.
