Something Lost
by Riley Neither
I’ve got a way with lost things. I think a lot of us who’ve run away from something do. Me, I can see the emotions left behind on a thing like neon fingerprints, and lost things have got their own special colors, deep hues I see all the time in the mirror.
I don’t like to look at people. Especially not in the eye. People have always got such rioting fireworks of feeling going off in their heads, it’s too much. Objects are simpler, with just enough and little enough emotion imprinted on them to make sense of.
Usually. Sometimes I do come across something a little strange. This time, it’s a bike. It’s been locked to a rack tucked away under some trees near the library for months, and I’m sure it hasn’t moved in all that time. The bike’s tires have gone flat, the chain’s gone crusty orange, and lately, with the weather warming up, there’s a great big spider web between it and the rack. It’s a cheap supermarket bike, used to be glittery purple, probably still is under all the neglect.
Reminds me a bit of the bike I had as a kid, bright and glittery with ribbons streaming off the handlebars. My dad and me used to go biking down a trail along the creek in the summers, and he’d let me beat him at races and stay late to try and catch fireflies. I miss those days.
But that’s not what’s been bothering me about this bike. It’s the emotions on it. It’s got all the colors of lost things, the deep maroon red of abandonment, the long stretch of gray time passed, the faded-at-the-edges navy blue of being noticed and ignored over and over again. But it’s got something else, too: a searing orange sense of purpose, that hasn’t faded one bit since the first time I saw it, like whoever put it there meant for it to sit there for months rusting away and had a darn good reason for it.
Normally, I like to take lost things home, wherever they need to be, whether that’s back to an old home or finding them a new one, but that orange has kept me hesitant. If someone did leave it on purpose, for whatever weird reason, and they mean to eventually come back for it, then I figure I shouldn’t mess with it. But I just can’t take the curiosity, and sooner or later the city’ll cut it loose anyway. They won’t even feel its purpose. To them it’s just scrap taking up space.
So I walk over to the bike and set my hand on its handlebar.
It shows me what all it’s been through, months rewinding under my fingertips, and colors that had retreated into the dark hollow spaces in its frame come back out, hope and worry and loneliness and freedom, until–
I pull my hand away like it stung me.
It felt like my dad.
That can’t be right. But I can’t unsee all the new colors I pulled out of it, and something about them, the exact hues and the way they fit together, looping into each other like a psychic signature—it’s my dad. He put this bike here. How could I not recognize him?
I didn’t feel anything of my mom in the bike, but still, I back away from it, tensing up so hard I almost can’t breathe. I can’t see my mom again. I can’t do it.
I run the hell away.
I avoid the library. I’m afraid I’m gonna start having flashbacks at every little thing that might remind me of my mom, but I don’t. Instead all I can think of is the last time I talked to my dad. It was more than a year ago.
I tried to explain to him how mom was abusive, to both of us. I tried to convince him to leave her. But like so many folks who’ve been abused—like me for so long, when I was still breaking myself trying to earn her love—he didn’t want to hear it. He said I was overreacting, lashing out, that nothing she’d done was really that bad, and he was nobody’s victim. And maybe she wouldn’t be so disappointed in me if I could just be even a little like the kid she wanted, thin and normal and obedient, none of this autism and gender-weirdness and talking about seeing emotions in the air. I cried, because I was used to that from her, but from him it was a whole new wound.
So I told him I couldn’t be near her, and if he wouldn’t leave her, then I couldn’t be near him, either. He chose her. I moved out and didn’t say where I was going, changed my number and my email and never spoke to either of them again.
The bike’s still there, weeks later when I finally come back. The spider web’s tattered, so I guess its maker moved out. Some of the colors I pulled out of the bike have faded again, but that searing orange purpose is as bright as ever.
I figure I know why he left it here. He wanted me to find it, and follow it back to him.
I don’t know if I want to.
I used to tell myself it was just a random talent, the way I’ve always been picking up lost things and taking them wherever they belonged. It’s a hard thing to admit that you’ve always been a little lost yourself. That you’ve always had some of the colors of neglect and abandonment tangled in your hair and flaking off your skin, even when you had your dad’s love rosy in your cheeks at the same time.
When I left home, I thought I was taking myself where I needed to be, like I’d done for so many other things. But people are so much harder than objects, and all I knew was where I needed not to be.
I take a deep breath and touch the bike again, and I let myself see all the emotions my dad left on it. Hope of seeing me again, worry it wouldn’t work, loneliness that’s not quite the same as the way he was lonely before—because he always was, with a wife who took all his emotional energy and gave none in return.
I still don’t feel any trace of my mom in the bike, and I would if it was there. Her icy blue spite, the dandelion yellow that looks so pretty you don’t realize it’s gaslighting, the rotten butter gray of taking, taking, taking, that’s a color scheme I’m not about to forget.
The bike’s got a combination lock. I try my birthday, and the lock clicks open.
I kick some of the rust off the chain and start walking the bike, on its sad flat tires. It knows where it wants to go, no doubt about it, and it’s not pulling me toward the house I grew up in, but off another way, toward I-don’t-know-what.
It takes me along maybe a mile, to an apartment complex. I slow down and look for any sign of my parents until I spot my dad, sitting out on one of the second-floor balconies reading a little book.
Anxiety makes me tense. I can’t help but expect to see my mom, too, and I’m suddenly dead scared that seeing her will undo the last year, that she’ll reel me back in and I’ll spend the rest of my life in her rotten numbing gray.
But it’s just my dad. So I make myself move forward ’til I’m nearly under his balcony. He still hasn’t noticed me.
Last chance to walk away, I tell myself.
“Hey,” I call up.
My dad jumps, pulls off his glasses, and lets his book fall when he sees me. He leans over the railing and says my name with joy, and then runs inside before I can say anything else.
This might be the longest minute of my life, waiting for him to reappear from the building’s main door.
When he does, he comes out running, ready to bear-hug me, until I step away. He stops, and his beaming smile shrinks a little.
“I left her,” he says.
It’s too good to be true. My throat tightens, and I can’t respond.
“I’m so sorry,” he says.
When he reaches out to me, I let go of the bike and realize how tight I was gripping it, leaving the texture of the rubber handlebars imprinted onto my palms. The bike falls in the grass, the sweet orange emotion on it dissipating into the air around us, and I step over it to hug him. He feels like home and fills me with enough of his warm rosy love to make us glow, and I feel something I think I’ve never felt before.
I feel like I’m here. We’re here. We’re where we’re supposed to be.
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Riley Neither is a trans and non-binary writer of speculative fiction. Zer short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Fireside, and Cast of Wonders. With a PhD in linguistics, ze currently works as a researcher and copy editor for an educational non-profit and spends zer free time writing, making art, and singing in a queer chorus. You can find zim online at www.rileyneither.com.