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114 Parable of Riding a Motorcycle Off a Cliff “A man falls from his chariot. His bones are the same as everyone else’s, but his injury is different.” —Chuang Tzu When his back wheel fishtails, time goes sideways, so he has time to see each bright pine needle on which the oil-black tires slide, time to note the white curb, knuckle skin tightening as his hand clenches on the brake, time to know he has no time for anything but smack the curb sideways and tumble, or angle the bike straight and hurdle the curb into the unknown, which is what he does. But he flies between pines and doesn’t clip them, and it rained last night so the ground he hits is moist and soft, and he goes dead but wakes up bloody and shoves the fractured bike off his girlfriend, who hasn’t figured so far in this story, but who is wearing a helmet and survives just fine, and then they walk back to her apartment, and her roommates bring a warm wet towel to wash blood and mud from his face, “But wait,” he says, “let’s take a photo first. This is a moment i want to remember.” Twenty years later, after he fell for another woman he didn’t figure on putting into this story, the snapshot drops from a book he unpacks from a box while moving into his new place, his new life after his life with her went crash. 115 He picks it up off the floor, an old black and white of some leather-jacketed young guy, full of beginnings, with a black blood smudge running from his nose, some fool staring out of the past, grinning. ...

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