PodCastle

* Author : Claire Humphrey
* Narrator : Jen R. Albert
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
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PodCastle 627: We Are the Flower is a PodCastle original.


Rated PG-13. Includes copious F-bombs.
We Are the Flower
By Claire Humphrey
I didn’t clue in until I saw the ghost bike chained to a signpost on Adelaide, near a corner. I was stopped up close, and I looked down and the angles of the frame were familiar. A Cannondale CAAD 5, just like mine. You could even see flashes of the same red and yellow logo underneath the white spray paint.
It’s, like, a pretty iconic bike, and you see them around a lot. So nothing too weird, right? Only then I noticed the luggage tag dangling from the handlebar. The neon green stood out against the white spray paint, and where you’d write the address someone had written, in silver marker, MISS YOU, MC.
Which is my name, or at least what I’m called.
I paused there a moment, one shoe clipped in, the other out and braced on the curb, then I looked at the rest of the bike again and saw, under the paint, the shape of my Trogdor sticker on the top tube.
Just like the one on the top tube of the red and yellow CAAD 5 I was currently riding.
Got to say, it shook me. I knew in my feelings even though I didn’t quite know in my mind. So what did I do?
Well, honestly, I turned into a bird.
That was not super useful, I know, but it just happened. Then I spent like five hours flapping around, screeching and shitting.
Eventually I calmed the fuck down and stopped being a bird. I found myself back at the ghost bike on Adelaide. My own bike — I mean the one I rode there on — was nowhere to be seen.
I held still and looked at the ghost bike again, closer. It was definitely mine. And there was the dangling luggage tag, and there was a bouquet of daisies hockey-taped to the rear triangle.
That’s what you do when someone dies in a bike accident. You paint their bike white and you set it up where they died. On rural roads people set up roadside crosses. In the city, you make a ghost bike.
That’s what you do when someone in the cycling community, a frequent rider, a bike lane advocate, dies. Someone like me. That’s what you do.
I said it like twelve different ways to myself, and it didn’t feel real.
Only it did feel real, because of some things like how I didn’t really know how I’d come to that corner that day, or where the other version of my bike had gone, or why the fuck I’d turned into a bird.
So, like, that was a lot to take in, you know? And I guess no one would blame me for freaking out a bit. And having an existential crisis about whether I was a ghost or a soul, and whether I was going to stay stuck here at the place where I died, and what the hell happened in the first place, and was I here to take vengeance on the driver who probably doored me and then backed over me or some shit.
And, uh, turning into a bird again for a bit, because it seemed like that was my thing now. Is there a religion where dead people turn into birds? Asking for a friend.

I’m telling this to you, but I don’t know if you can hear it. I’m right beside you in your bed.
You’re flat on your back, snoring. You aren’t wearing your sleep apnea mask. You smell like booze, which kind of bothers me: you aren’t supposed to drink with your antidepressants, but also, I’m a fucking ghost,