Atalanta Wins Again
by N. E. Chenier
She hurled the helmet as far as she could. It skipped once, shattering the moon's watery trail under crimson fiberglass, then subsided. The rage strained to rip itself out of her throat, but all she could manage was a low growl. "Greedy bitch," Atalanta snarled at the indifferent sea.
The Pacific coiled around her waist, dragging with frigid fingers at her jeans. The waves droned back at her. Mother had taken another one. His mangled chopper lay in a tangled mess about the shoals. The dark rocks jutted up from the wash like decayed teeth up from boiling saliva. They would never find the body.
Stretching a hundred meters, the bald-faced bluff rose impassively up to the fatal bend in the coastal highway. In the last five years, eight swaggering leather boys challenged Lanta to keep up on her unassuming beast along the familiar stretch of road. Inevitably and one by one, they swerved too wide as Lanta sped tightly into the turn, rising on the saddle like a circus dancer to avoid shredding her calf on the asphalt. Each time she felt more than heard the rival cycle leave the highway. Eight leather boys semi-wittingly sacrificed themselves to the patient maternal deep. Had it been only seven, all might have been forgiven between mother and daughter.
Tanner said he'd been born with the name, but she suspected it had been drawn from the smooth, lovingly-battered skins hugging his legs, from the saddle bags slung over one shoulder, from his own visage browned by hundreds of miles in the open air. The sun had kissed his curls the color of golden apples. When released from his black bandana, they fell around his leonine face like a mane. A breezy smile undercutting dead-serious eyes turned her way and churned her insides. She prayed he wouldn't dare the race, even as she licked her lips at the prospect.
The geas kept her from cheating, from checking her speed to let him glide ahead. It was unconscious, it manifested as a recognition that such machinations would be an insufferable insult to honor. She never stopped to question whose honor she might be guarding. Tanner straddled a bike he'd put together himself, poured himself into until it was part of his body — she knew this as she sat astride a machine that purred to her own pulse. So, the delight was only partially a surprise that he never sagged more than a bike length behind.
He's the one. He's the one, she insisted to herself, to the universe, despite the oracular restraint.
When the curve came, they rode parallel. Twins, simultaneously swinging their booted-feet up to counterbalance their steeds. Yes!
Then, despite their perfect synchronization, he started a slide to the edge as if pulled by a magnet. With the reflexes born of desperation, she leapt toward him, pedaling her limbs, swimming in the long air above the beach. She wanted to hold him, to at least catch his attention to let him know it really was okay, but his eyes were squeezed shut, his smile lost in a grimace of fear. The waters took him first weighted as he was still clinging to his bike. She opened her arms to meet her own end. Triumph swelled beneath her ribs. I'm going with him.
But the waves had spat her out again. She woke covered in sand, physically unscathed.
Lanta's reflection shivered and blurred into liquid shadow. Long had she lived with the geas — worn it, in fact, like a badge. It would never have ended with a pathetic lover's leap. Who was she kidding? The understanding came at her like a cool lectured breeze — a calm, oft-repeated lesson from an ever-patient parent, leaving her once again the surly child. Acid frustration ravaged her throat. Would the clownfish ever forsake the anemone?
I'm done, she told herself, fiercely, willing the intention outward and daring the marine depths to do anything about it. Get someone else to feed you.
It was not a machine that she could love nor was it part of her. She hadn't poured her sweat into it. A functional thing, no attachment. She just slapped down the credit card and drove it off the lot. It would do. Over the rear wheel two weathered saddlebags swelled — those had all the sentiment she needed to keep on course.
Iowa. Flat and the largest body of water was an innocuous manmade square cut into the plain. She steered eastward just to the left of an unremarkable dawn.