RANKS OF GLORY

RANKS OF GLORY

The buildings were red. Their roofs were black. They were uniform, and each reached to the twilight sky, with their eyes trained on the orange clouds and their faces turned away, in a manner of superiority, from the ground from whence they came. Select buildings had neon signs, advertising empty candy shops and drawing attention to a marquee with a desolate and overcast single box-office. The sun was always setting somewhere in between the high skyline, and the sky was always warm and simmering with orange and red and gold-gilded clouds. The outline of the ambitious regulars with their two or three black-framed windows apiece was hazy in the eye of the sun, and the twilight always seemed to swallow up the edges, giving the buildings an infinitely indefinite form.
On the gray, lifeless sidewalk underneath a flickering neon sign sat a boy. It was as if he was sitting apart from the sidewalk, though, on another planet which boasted life and energy. His face, though pale, was bright with possibility and his dark eyes were aglow with persistence. He sat only for a second, with his elbows on his beige shorts and his hands intertwined with his black hairs. His eyes were darting, and he was thinking, wondering where he'd look next. His leg was shaking, still only at his toes which were enshrouded in a red shoe. He wasn't sweating yet, but he sat up to wipe his forehead with his hand, as if preparing the slate for the cool profuse that was to seep from his pores onto his freckled face.
He lifted his head and beamed into the orange twilight. He turned around hurriedly and lunged for his vintage blue bike-- a Shoal700 with a petite frame and black handlebars, and handbrakes on both sides and flaking blue paint, that he had be given on his seventh birthday. He pushed the ground with his foot, alternating between left and right, using the lifeless, gray sidewalk to provide his bike the momentum it needed to drive him towards fascination and play.

The boy rode past the red buildings, returning their apathy with his eyes ahead on the black, lusterless, unmarked road. His bike wheels spun past the forest of red buildings that stood all by themselves; bodies with no intestines, eyes with no heart. There was nothing standing beneath the marquees, no feet planted on the gray sidewalk, no color other than red moving forwards and backwards in the boy's peripherals. And so he rode, on the main street, towards the Government.
The blue bike slowed down when it reached the center of the city, where the red buildings were even redder, and their noses turned higher to the air. The always-setting sun was snuffed out behind a wall of black roofs, and the twilight sky was only allowed to boast its dark orange tint.
The boy came to a halt, squeezing both handbrakes and letting his red shoes skid along the asphalt. His eyes were fixed on the divider between Government and all else; a solid black line that made everything in front of him darker than it was behind. He screwed up his face, thinking again, his eyes slightly dulled by the darkness that ran up walls and engulfed roads, and his skin a little paler as the color ran into the nothingness in front of him. He sat on his black bike seat; his toes planted gingerly on the ground and his face resting heavily in his hands. The air stirred slightly around him, growing impatient with his stillness, urging him to cut through its currents and pleasure it with the interaction that it had so missed.
However, the boy still sat with his toes planted gingerly on the ground, and his hands resting between strands of hair. His eyebrows were caved inwards, and his eyelids were closed over his eyes. He dropped one hand on the handlebar, and with a sigh, he released his eyes to embrace what was in front of him, and brought his hand to hold the other handlebar. His right hand played with the right handbrake, and with another sigh and a shake of his head, he lifelessly pushed his bike on his tip-toes towards the darkness.

He got off of his bike on the right side, and walked it forward. His steps were silent in the silence, broken only by the clicking sound of the gears of the bike finding their places in the grooves of the chain, working to perpetuate a joint relationship of pulling and grooving.