“12 Blown Tires" • Tennis (by Daniel Sylvan Paige)

“What do we put on our feet when we want to go on a hike?” 

Your mother leaps to her own feet and belts out, “Bicycle!” Her finger pointing skyward.  She is so absolutely sure of her solution, so wildly positive that she beams like a supernova that’s  just gobbled up everything in its blast radius. 

The engagement coordinator smiles brightly to match her roaring engine but is steadfastly  non-committal and looks around at the mostly astonished group before her, “And what else?  Anyone…?”  

Your mother remains triumphant and swamps her gaze across the other residents, pushing  them into the submission of silence. Not one soul dares to doubt her. 

Her confidence hasn’t wavered since it all went down—just the particulars, the confusing  middling bits. She loves Word Game Wednesdays, but now it’s time to get to work and you lead  her to the door, signaling for one of the aides to let you out.  

That she continues to cut and style hair in the community salon downstairs is madness.  But they allow it. “She’s not causing any harm,” the director of the memory neighborhood says.  That’s debatable. 

Armed with safety scissors used for pet grooming, she has a few of her old clients who  swing by for an appointment here and there.  

Flip, a sixtysomething man in the middle of a divorce stops by for a trim and a chat every  week. He’s mainly used your mother as a sounding board, a counselor, like most of her clients.  She was always a good listener and a terrible hair stylist and is now even worse at the latter,  often refusing to cut anything off the top or the back. The mullet is alive and well in the  basement of The Residence at Barnard Ridge.  

“Are those oysters in yer pocket or are ya just happy to see me?” she greets Flip and they  both laugh hoarsely and this sort of nonsensical banter irritates you to the core though you  haven’t quite reconciled exactly why. Make a note on your phone to bring it up in therapy on  Friday, it’s worth exploring. 

After Flip leaves with several clumps of what’s left of his mane pointing in different  directions, a hefty woman with barely any teeth left named Tallulah ambles in. She’s an  independent liver at the residence and your mother talks non-stop about the movie Inglorious  Bastards, hardly touching a hair on Tallulah’s head. She gets the plot of the movie all wrong and  after forty-five minutes she tears the cape off of Tallulah. Tallulah tips her a fiver and she’s gone.  

“Where were we?” she asks. 

But there are no more clients this afternoon and your mother starts to sulk. Her pouting,  now childlike, gets heavier and you know where this is going so you give in and tell her just a  trim.

She shampoos your hair, adding conditioner before barely rinsing out any of it. The  difference when she cuts your hair is that there is no conversation and she just attacks your curls  with her safety scissor. You’ll have to stop and get it fixed on your way home, explaining it all to  whatever barber is available at Rudy’s and it almost isn’t worth the trouble, but it is. 

Before you leave, she starts to loop certain events of the day—bicycle she starts in again,  she giggles. Bicycle, she titters.  

And you imagine later, long after you’ve gone, bicycle, as she warbles her way into a  slumber when the Trazodone kicks in and takes over whatever part of her brain, whatever neural  pathway leads to the center of her infinity. To the collective that guides her and has driven her on  tandem across decades and lifetimes and has never really let her down and probably never will.  

There’s a primal strength in that sort of conviction, right or wrong, and you realize that  most of everything you were ever told as a child was objectively out of balance with reality. You  were given a shot at that kind of faith and chose not to take it. And it could very well be your  downfall. But sometimes that’s just the way bicycle was meant to be.

Daniel Sylvan Paige is a recovering TV writer and emerging fiction writer with his first published story recently appearing in Wigleaf.