Bicycle

His father stuck bicycle spokes into his shoulder blades and told him to fly.
The boy lifted his arms, gingerly, and broke into a sort of awkward gallop. He floundered around the parking lot behind the general store until he collapsed into an exhausted heap on the pavement, with clean trails traced by tears writing a roadmap on his face. The blood running down his back was starting to stain his t-shirt.
He gritted his teeth. He could feel the metal extending its roots into his flesh.
Dad scooped him up and told him they’d try again tomorrow. He said, “It’s never too late to learn to fly.”
Dad dumped the heap of boy-limbs and torn t-shirt into the back of the pickup truck and they drove home.
Dad bandaged his new puncture wounds and put him to bed.
They found him asleep in his bed the next morning, sweaty and clammy and curled up on his side because the bicycle spokes kept him from lying on his back.
The boy peered at his father from behind heavy eyelids. “Dad, why don’t you have wings?”
They drove to the parking lot.
This time, the boy found he could lift his arms a little further. He could feel the cold metal sprouting buds. He took note of all his sensations: the bandages against his skin, the cold wind in his hair, the smell of gasoline and maple syrup in his nose.
He felt stiff and unused.
The boy began to run.

On a blustery day, they saw some kid with metal sticking out of his shoulders. It looked like two TV antennas with branches. They watched him walk down the sidewalk, hunched over, fighting against the wind with his entire skinny frame.
They clawed at him, pulling on the metal until it came out by the roots. He was sixteen. He felt his heart falling out of his chest. He felt the world go dark and black as the wind was knocked out of him, not by fists but by his heart dropping kerplop on the sidewalk, and he heard the sound just as clearly as if that muscle had been cut out of his chest.
But instead he was missing his shoulder blades. They had found him on the sidewalk in a pool of blood. (If you looked close you could see traces of silver.) They scoped him up quick and stuck him in an ambulance. He was lucky to be alive.
He told them he wasn’t.
He couldn’t be, he had forgotten a vital organ back there on the sidewalk.
They told him it was okay, they gave him some pills and he faded back into the sheets of the hospital bed, just as pale and frail and mass-produced, some teenager that got jumped on the street.
And three days later he was out of the big white hospital, sore and tired and feeling lighter than he had for eight years. He felt disproportionate.
And now, here he was, teaching his son to fly.