Chapter One

There is a time when I am on my bike. My pant leg is rolled up to keep off the grease from the chain. I am riding home. It is spring and I do not take the bus any more. In winter, I took the bus everyday and spent more time indoors, turning pale.

As I ride, my eyes start to tear up from the wind. The air is different today. Maybe the wind is coming from the sea and this is unusual. If I think about it, I can smell the ocean through the air, and this makes sense because the ocean is not far away.

I will see the ocean soon. I will not work for another week, as tomorrow I will be catching the 8:05 northbound train. I stand up on the pedals as I coast down the hill. I like standing up, because I suddenly feel like my bike fits me. Usually I cannot make the seat high enough and I really hate pedaling with my legs always bent - never able to straighten them out.

I shift my backpack as the #3 bus passes me. This is the bus I would take, and it seems to accelerate as it passes me, with misty black fumes and a mechanical roar. Like a tiger. The bus is red, and it would be a good tiger. A gigantic mechanical red tiger. It would thrash through the woods and pick up passengers that didn't want to be passengers. It would be vicious.

In my backpack are 3 cheese rolls that I got from work. At the end of the day, employees are allowed to take home extra bread, and I was happy to get 3 of the cheese rolls. Normally I would want something sweeter, so I could have a bigger breakfast, but I am saving today's bread for tomorrow's train ride.

At work, the extra bread is kept in a black plastic bag. Something is wrong with this, because it's the same kind of bag we put all our trash in. Still, it seems clean as long as there is only bread in it.

Getting ready to make the turn into my neighborhood, I ease out into the lane, look down the oncoming traffic and ride through the gates to my subdivision. Maybe it's not a subdivision, but I'm pretty sure that all the houses were built around the same time. 30 years ago, this area was probably all farmland. It's my home, though I'm not so sure that I like it. I park my bike in the small wooden shed outside the house and scour my pockets for the house key.