A story from a prompt:
Imagine this: a room filled with the hum of creativity, the scratching of pens against paper, and the occasional burst of laughter as ideas collide.
That’s where you’ll find me, well by zoom since I moved to the country, a proud director of our small but fiercely passionate Writing Group in my old hometown.
This week? Oh, this week is special. The challenge is simple yet brimming with possibility: craft a story that begins or ends with a bicycle.
A single object, two wheels, infinite potential. Will it be a tale of freedom, of mystery, or perhaps of heartbreak?
The group is ready to dig deep, to wrestle with their imaginations and see where the humble bicycle takes them.And you?
You’re about to get a front-row seat to the magic that unfolds. Buckle up (or should I say, hop on?). The journey is just about to begin.
The following is my story from a somewhat childhood memory, and an imagination, as a girl with freckles and red hair is a part of the story.
The Bicycle and the Bay Mare
The summer Thomas turned twelve, the world smelled of hot asphalt and cut grass, and his blue Schwinn bicycle was the finest thing he owned.
His father had rescued it from a yard sale for eight dollars, sanded off the rust, and painted it the color of a robin’s egg.
Thomas rode it everywhere: to the creek, to the library, to the little store on Miller Road where Mrs. Halvorsen sold penny candy that hadn’t cost a penny in thirty years.
That Tuesday afternoon in July, he was flying down Ridgewood Lane with a paper bag of licorice ropes bouncing in his front basket.
The wind pulled at his hair. His legs pumped in perfect rhythm. He was, he decided, the fastest boy in the county, possibly the state, possibly the world.
He was thinking exactly this when a horse came around the bend.
It was enormous, a mountain of muscle and gleaming chestnut hide, hooves hammering the pavement like a blacksmith’s anvil.
Thomas had just enough time to see the flash of a red-gold mane, both the horse’s and the rider’s, before he yanked his handlebars sideways and sailed straight into Mr. Peterson’s hedge.
The Schwinn went one way. Thomas went another. The licorice went everywhere.
“Oh my gosh, are you alive?”
A face appeared above him, upside down through the tangle of privet leaves. Freckles. Green eyes. Hair the color of a maple tree in October, spilling down in wild waves that seemed to catch every scrap of sunlight and hold it hostage.
“I think so,” Thomas managed. A leaf was in his mouth. He spit it out with what he hoped was dignity.
“I am so sorry. Dolly spooked at a plastic bag. She’s a total drama queen about plastic bags, and I couldn’t get her to …”
The girl paused, tilting her head. “You’re bleeding.”
Thomas touched his elbow. He was, indeed, bleeding. It seemed a small price to pay for continuing to be looked at by this person.
“I’m Ellen,” she said, offering a hand streaked with horse sweat and dust.
“Ellen Brennan. We just moved into the yellow house on Fox Hollow.”
“Thomas,” he said. His voice came out slightly strangled.
“Thomas Kepler.”
She helped him up, retrieved his bicycle (which had a new and interesting bend in the front fender), and gathered up as many licorice ropes as could be salvaged.
The horse, Dolly, watched all of this with the mild, unimpressed expression of a creature who had caused chaos and considered her work done.
“Come by the stable sometime,” Ellen said, swinging back into the saddle with an ease that struck Thomas as miraculous.
She clicked her tongue, and Dolly wheeled around and cantered off, and Thomas stood in the middle of Ridgewood Lane holding a bent bicycle and a bag of dirty licorice, and knew with absolute certainty that his life had changed.
He waited three days. Three days felt appropriately casual.
Three days felt like a boy who had many important things to do and only happened, in passing, to remember there was a stable on Fox Hollow.
In truth, he thought about it every waking minute.
The Brennan place was set back from the road behind a row of oaks, with a weathered red barn and a paddock ringed by white fencing that had gone gray at the posts.
Thomas leaned his Schwinn against a fence rail and walked toward the barn, and there, in the shadowed doorway, was Ellen, not in the jodhpurs and boots he’d half-expected, but in cutoff jeans and a t-shirt with a hole in the shoulder, mucking a stall with a pitchfork nearly as tall as she was.
“You came!” she said, and her whole face lit up in a way that made Thomas’s ears go hot.
“Come meet everybody.”
Everybody, it turned out, was not just Dolly.
There was Dolly, yes, the chestnut mare from the road, but also a stocky black gelding named Pepper, a spotted pony called Bandit who had, according to Ellen, “opinions,” and an ancient white horse named Mr. Biscuit who was thirty-one years old and, Ellen said solemnly, the finest gentleman she’d ever known.
Thomas offered his palm the way Ellen showed him, flat and steady, and Mr. Biscuit breathed onto it with a warm, hay-scented sigh.
Something inside Thomas’s chest turned over.
“You should ride,” Ellen said.
“I don’t know how.”
“That,” she said, “is exactly why you should learn.”
He came back the next day. And the day after.
Ellen was a patient teacher and a merciless one.
She made him groom Mr. Biscuit for a full week before she’d let him sit on the old horse’s back, and even then, only at a walk, in circles, in the corral, while she called out corrections from the fence.
“Heels down, Thomas!”
“They are down!”
“Down like you mean it. Like gravity is your personal friend.”
He fell off twice. The first time he landed in soft dirt and Ellen laughed so hard she had to sit down. The second time he landed in something considerably less soft, and Ellen laughed so hard she cried, and Thomas found that he didn’t mind at all, because when she laughed her whole face crinkled up and her freckles danced.
By August he could trot without bouncing.
By September he could post.
By the time the leaves turned, Ellen let him ride Pepper, and the two of them went out along the trails behind the Brennan property, ducking under low branches, Dolly and Pepper’s hooves whispering through the fallen leaves.
The Schwinn stayed in the yard, propped against the fence.
Years unfolded the way years do: quickly, when you look back at them; slowly, when you’re inside them.
Thomas grew tall and lean, with a rider’s hands and a rider’s seat.
Ellen grew into her freckles.
They rode through four autumns and three summers together, through a hundred sunsets over the ridge, through a season when Mr. Biscuit lay down in his stall and did not get up, and Thomas held Ellen while she cried into his shoulder for the finest gentleman she’d ever known.
There was the winter Ellen’s father lost his job and she came to school with red-rimmed eyes, and Thomas learned that sometimes the most useful thing a person could do was simply be present, and quiet, and steady, the way Mr. Biscuit had once been for both of them.
There was the spring Thomas’s mother got sick, and Ellen rode over on Dolly every single afternoon, and sat with him on the porch, and didn’t try to fix anything, because some things can’t be fixed, only witnessed.
There was the first kiss, under the oak tree by the corral, when Thomas was seventeen and Ellen was seventeen and a half and had never let him forget the half.
There was the college years, and the long-distance letters, and the summer they both came home and knew, without saying it, that they were done pretending to be uncertain.
There was a small wedding in the Brennan’s front pasture, with folding chairs borrowed from the church and Dolly, gone gray around the muzzle now, watching over the fence like a chaperone.
The blue Schwinn stayed leaned against the fence rail where Thomas had first left it.
At first, someone would move it. Ellen’s father, when he mowed; Thomas himself, when he remembered. But the years wore on, and the bicycle wore down. The tires went flat. The chain went orange with rust. Ivy found the wheels first, then the frame. A morning glory climbed the handlebars one summer and never really left.
A robin nested in the basket the year Ellen turned twenty-four, and the year after that, and the year after that.
Nobody moved it anymore. It had become part of the fence, part of the yard, part of the place. A blue-green ghost of the boy who had once been the fastest in the county, possibly the state, possibly the world.
It is a Saturday afternoon in late June, and Thomas is thirty-four years old.
He and Ellen are down by the lake behind what used to be her parents’ farm and is now, deed and mortgage and all, theirs.
A red plaid blanket is spread on the grass beneath the willow. The picnic basket, her grandmother’s, the wicker frayed at the corners, one hinge held together with baling wire, sits open and mostly empty.
There are the last crusts of a sandwich. A jar with two swallows of lemonade. A peach with two bites taken out of it, one small (hers) and one large (his).
Not far off, in the shallow slope of the pasture, two horses graze in the slow, unhurried way of horses who know they are home.
One is a bay mare with a white star. The other is a chestnut gelding whose sire, if you traced the papers back far enough, was a mare named Dolly.
Ellen is lying on her back with her head in Thomas’s lap. Her red hair, still absurd, still catching every scrap of sunlight it can find, is spread across his knee. He is twirling a piece of it around his finger, the way he has been doing for fifteen years, the way he suspects he will still be doing when they are eighty.
“Do you remember,” she says, eyes closed, “the licorice?”
“I remember the licorice.”
“It was disgusting. The licorice.”
“It was covered in gravel.”
“And you ate it anyway.”
“I did not.”
“You did. I saw you. You ate a piece with a leaf stuck to it because you were trying to seem casual.”
Thomas laughs. Somewhere up by the house, on the other side of the pasture, leaning against a fence rail nobody has repainted in twenty years, a blue Schwinn bicycle is quietly dissolving into the landscape. Weeds have grown up through its spokes. A morning glory is in bloom on its handlebars. If you didn’t know it had once been a bicycle, you might not guess.
If you did know, you might think it looked less like a ruin and more like a small, patient monument. To a boy who rode too fast around a corner. To a girl on a horse who couldn’t stop. To the exact and unrepeatable accident of two lives colliding on a summer afternoon and choosing, ever after, not to come apart.
Ellen opens her eyes and looks up at him. The freckles are still there. The green eyes are still there. Everything, somehow, is still there.
“Thomas,” she says.
“Yes.”
“I’m really glad you didn’t die in that hedge.”
He bends down and kisses her forehead. The horses graze. The lake laps at the shore. The picnic basket holds its small ruins with dignity.
“Me too,” he says. “Me too.”
A Whisper from the Past, a Chance at Redemption
If that little taste of my writing intrigued you, then you won’t want to miss my novel, Nothing But Time.It begins with a letter…a letter that arrives three weeks after Jack Harper stopped mattering.Jack gave everything to his career.
His marriage slipped through his fingers. His daughter grew up without him. Forty-one years of sunsets went unwatched, and the roses? Never smelled.
Now retired, redundant, and utterly adrift, Jack is left wondering if it was all worth it.
Then, out of nowhere, he inherits an old farmhouse from Ed, the friend who once tried to warn him.
Ed, who escaped to Vermont years ago, died alone, and left Jack with one simple instruction:
“Tend the roses. Stop and smell them. Live.”
But the farmhouse isn’t what it seems. The radio crackles with broadcasts from 1943. The roses bloom when Jack kneels in the soil. And at the edge of the orchard, Ed keeps appearing—smiling, waiting, calling Jack to finally understand what he refused to see all those years.Some second chances come with instructions. Some come with ghosts.
Are you ready to discover which one Jack will choose?
Your Voice Matters
If this story resonated with you, don’t hold back, leave a comment!
Your thoughts, your reactions, and your support are what keep this journey alive. I know you’re out there, and your presence means everything to me.
Go ahead, share your voice, and let’s keep this connection alive.
Have a blessed day…you’re the reason I do this.
-Scott
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