“Thees is never going to work.” His Italian accent was heavy, each word as rounded and full as his drooping eyelids. His hair was slicked back, moustache as carefully curled as the thick fingers around his beaded glass.
“Shut yer face,” Butch drawled, never taking his eye from the gun’s sight. “Don’t hear yah giv’n us any better ideas.”
“Fighting won’t get us anywhere,” Rabi Lenovitch soothed, stroking his long dark beard nervously. “We need to work together, as a team.”
“It is a bicycle!” Mario bellowed, waving his arm and sloshing cold beer across the top of the bar. His next words were punctuated by a loud gunshot as Butch fired. Everyone’s ears were ringing, but through the watery noise could be heard, “Look at it!”
“It is a bicycle,” the Rabi agreed. “And yet.”
“And yet?” Mario asked. His outward appearance was one of scorn and despair, but in his eyes was the hunted look of prey given the whiff of freedom: hope still lived.
Another enemy fell, but more were coming every minute. “Now or never!” Butch yelled, and fired again. “I’ve got as much ammo left as a two-bit whore’s got a sense a decency!”
“None,” the Rabi translated, and Mario shook his head, downing the dregs of his drink.
“Fine,” he said, hoisting the bicycle to a standing position. “Viva la muerte.”
“That don’t make any sense,” Butch snapped, throwing the gun in a wild swing. His worn red hair was plastered to his neck with sweat, but somehow through it all he’d kept his cowboy hat firmly on his head. “That’s not Eye-talian, that’s Mexican!”
Mario chose the back seat, swinging one brown boot over the side of the bright red, three seat bicycle, and gripped the handlebars tight as the others mounted. It was easy for Butch, but Rabi Lenovitch struggled to get his long cassock over the crossbeam in the centre.
“One,” Butch said. “Two.”
“Wait!” the Rabi called, and reaching down, he picked up the goat he had brought from Seville. Mario groaned, dropping his head momentarily on Butch’s back, who smacked him off.
“Not the fucking goat, Father!”
“Rabi,” Lenovitch corrected, adjusting the goat in the basket. For the goat’s part, he merely blinked and looked around, as if the gunfire and flames were nothing to him. He took an experimental bite out of the wicker beside him and seemed pleased with the results.
“Beh,” he said.
“Go, go!” Mario yelled.
“One two three!” Butch screamed without a breath in between.
In tandem the three men pedalled. For the past six months they had been running, always running from the enemy, but now they met them head on. The hoardes paused, confused by the change of strategy as the bicycle careened towards them. Past hollowed out shells of buildings, past flames of a hundred dying fires. One bullet dinged off a metal crosspiece and Mario swore prettily in Italian.
“It’s not working!” He yelled.
“Rabi!!” Butch screamed.
“Faith,” the Rabi gasped between heaving breaths. “Faith.”
And the bicycle rose.
Up off the ground, over the startled heads of the approaching mass, up, over the buildings, up, past where there should be no air to breathe and yet still the bicycle rose, and further and faster than a bicycle should go, one minute, twenty, thirty and they were through the sky, into the stars and the red velvet of space that surprised them with its colour and depth, and the world a glittering shell behind them, flames shrunk to obscurity and lost in the green wash of life and the blue glitter of water and the stars like miracles beside them and around them, and the goat, calmly chewing its bite of wicker, and staring at the beauty of the cosmos with a blank, bored expression.
Image by Kieran Macanulty
Glad that these are still coming!
Also, that goat is now my favorite character from anything. “Space, baa. Whatever.”