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Cycle Path
Careening, careering, one of the two. The rattle and clank of chains and aluminum and the wild abandonment of the wind roaring through one's hair felt really good. Wildly good, in fact. And everytime the tyres hit a rock or a bit of gravel crunched and was felt to give way as the bicycle careened and careered from side to side down the track it felt even better, as the feeling of barely being in control was even stronger, even more glorious as the gravel and pedals and spokes and hair and feathers and the whole lot whooshed past like the wind and the grass and the little kids with helmets and kneepads on and the signs and more gravel and dust and aluminum gloriousness...
'If you love something, set it free,' it's owner had said, as it let it first out of the cage and then the window sometime earlier that day. However, if you're going to let it go, it thought, you should damn well tell it to stay away from bicycles if you know there's no way your feet are going to reach the pedals.
Parrots shouldn't ever get on a bicycle an old saying went, and if any old saying didn't say so, one of them most certainly should. And it should have stood doubly so for parakeets.
There had been reports in the paper or perhaps on the television, or somewhere, it recalled seeing, of pedestrians and bicycles and some sort of combinatorial story in which the two of them met unhappy ends, both in their own separate ways , or perhaps it was in the leaflet that man at the gate of the park was handing out, or perhaps, oh! it was that sign, the one it had passed, on the way up the hill, or perhaps across the flat bit, where it wasn't paying so much attention to where it was going, and watched the people kiting off in the field, and it's mind sort of wandered, lonely as a cloud, it had thought, thinking itself original, and possibly original for a parakeet, but who was to know for sure, the sign, saying something... something about... ah, damn that cheap low-grade seed it'd been getting in the cage, it impaired it's memory, it was sure of it, as well, 'if you love something, let it go, my a**e,' it thought, 'if you love something feed it some decent bloody food once in a while and you might get love in return,' it gave a listless kick at the pedals, which didn't do much in terms of it's forward momentum, as it was still going wildly fast down the hill. Which reminded it, it was going quite fast, and the wind was whooshing past at an alarming rate. At least seven thousand kilo-whooshes an hour, in parakeet parlance. Whooshing and, oh, the ground seemed to be giving way each time it shifted it's weight around, whether intentionally or as a matter of course, due to the violent rocking of the bicycle along the path down the hill, and it dawned on the little parakeet that the lovely copse of trees at the end of the path, or not the end, but off the end of it as it reached the bottom of the hill and the path itself turned off towards yet more curvy pastures (if not less steep, a blessing), loomed much the way lovely copses of trees shouldn't, and it also dawned on it that it was very near, very very near, as it's speed made things, and the trees and the ending of the path weren't nearly so objectively, ehm, observable as they had been seconds before, as it whizzed past yet one more kid in yellow bike helmet and ice cream-stained mouth trundling a bicycle with training wheels and Spiderman stickers and it's very brief little yellow and green life flashed before it's eyes, which was a worrying thing, and somewhat boring, to tell the truth, until this point, that is, which wasn't really a great consolation, and there came the trees, looming in their former loveliness up closer and closer, and it could even sense the deer off in the distance waiting for the crash of aluminum or whatever the bike was made out of and whatever it was the parakeet was made out of splatting against the tree with bated breath, this all just out of the corner of it's senses, like some bizarre picture-in-picture memory sort of thing...
This is, of course, when it remembered that it could fly.
The tree, alas, had no such recourse.
disclaimer:
This is not happening, this is not happening (this may be repeated as either a magical sort of incantation-like thing or as a plea, however it pleases yourself).
Next week we return to our regular programming, without so much parakeets and gravel.
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Yer Weekly Horoscopes. Spiffy and nice.