Igor Clark

It's a bright, crisp day on the autumn cusp of summer, and I’m in Portland, Maine; wandering, solitary, drinking in the surroundings and stealing snaps away with me.

As I straighten from my crouch, a young woman approaches me, an equally young man in tow. The boy, uncertain, sports a shock of orange hair; the girl wields a Sony DSLR and a resolute expression. We stand face to face, exchanging an expectant stare as though each would read the other’s intention through the eye – and, almost defiantly, she raises the camera and steals in turn a snap from me.

She lowers her device, holds my gaze for a moment, and walks calmly away. The boy follows. Not a word is spoken.

I stand for a moment, let it pass without question, and feel free.

A young lady sitting at a junction chatted idly with her passenger, and, when ready, thrust a tonne of moulded metal across my two-wheeled path as I sailed into a green-light gauntlet, throwing the common perception of rectitude conferred on me by that beacon into stark relief against its ultimate meaninglessness.

Time lolled lazily ahead of me, affording a nonchalant Destiny the opportunity to dangle in my sights the possibility of action against its intended trajectory; daring me to deny its dominion, challenging my challenge of its apparent authority.

Contemplation of the uselessness of an in any case absent bell done and dusted, the startling abundance of exhalation sprung like a well from my lungs was still not sufficiently strong to penetrate the toughened glass shield, and this first fist shaken furiously at the hand of Fortune fell again, futile.

Shaken suddenly from a now seemingly lifelong sensory indolence, abruptly acutely aware of the surrounding world’s almost visceral and certainly soon-to-be tangible physical indifference to my plight, my mind elevated by excitement and adrenaline to that mythical state of presence to the moment of existence, I grasped fully in that very moment the eternally infinite complexity of Now; that vortex of happenstance, that abundance of potential pathways continually strewn palm-like before us and summarily trodden beneath the grinding steps of our narcoleptic trudge through the luminous intervals we call our lives.

Seized by my own capacity, I squeezed on my brake and the back wheel – apprising me, even in my access of apprehension, of the paradox of choice and mechanism – started to skid on the dry tarmac, ceasing immediately on my grip’s relaxation; one course closed, I opened immediately another, my mind and body tightened, together, to a sneer at such dualistic distinctions, and tilted my frame away from true, leaning into a leftward swerve which though inadequate to avert entirely the expected collision, would surely diminish its force, and leave me free to proceed with my reflections?

The instant of impact took me momentarily outside of myself; in the pitching, yawing rolls of hand-wound gramophone cycles, the bike was knocked from under me and I slid to the dirt, my ear presumably, as evidenced by its subsequent revelation to a hospital nurse of chipped black metallic paint, grazing the nearside wing of the car fractions of a second before the ground treated my elbow in the same manner. The cosmos scrabbling around me in a crazed dash to regain its familiar orientation, my panorama returned to its customary aspect and I lifted my head towards the rapidly-approaching anxious onlookers, then back to the car, puzzled as to why its passenger, the door now open, was towering above me at such an unusual angle.

I stood, dazed but unbroken, and was assisted kindly to the roadside where I sat for a moment bemused, befuddled, and bewildered, distracted from my meditations by the ministrations of an emergency-ambulance motorcyclist. Where was I hurt, could I see, could I feel?

To those questions I could provide answers, but to another, more fundamental: had I averted my fate, or merely co-operated in its implementation? – I had, and have, none.