Gravel wedged into stripes on my skin, her elbow scraped to the bone.
For the second before I knew it was just that — a bang up, a scrape up;
that the van behind us had slowed to a stop and not careened itself into our flesh and now exposed bones. Before I realized that our helmets worked, that our reflexes worked, that we’d be late for school but we’d make it.
For that one second, I was dead and she was dead and he was mad and her sister, devastatingly sad.
But then I came to, pinned to the asphalt. Her, crying and alive. The man from the van picking up our things, asking if we were okay. All I knew to do was not look at him, not ask him to pull up my bike, to do it myself to show her, my last born baby, that we were okay.
I put her on my lap, there on the sidewalk, inches from where the gravel made its lashes like a god giving form, filling each strike with itself, traffic thickening around the roundabout, to say — yes, that was scary, but look! we are here. This is what life is. Bike rides and bike spills and we mustn’t be afraid. You’re okay and I am okay and we are going to get back on that bike — muscle jutting from my blood-streaked calf, blood pooling at the knee, covering the bits of black gravel with a blood red paint — because that is what we do. We get back up.
We get back on.