Girl on a Bike

Posted on August 5, 2022 by John Biscello

   I bike through the swirling dust. The dust pinches my skin. The dust is cinematic. It seems, nowadays, everything is cinematic. Novels, TV, reality, cinema … dust. We have become cinemanesthasized. We are in a trance. How long will it last? One hundred years? One thousand? A trance is a trance is a trance. However long it lasts, I’m not worried. Even though I won’t be here, I’ll be here. Know what I mean?

   We are bewitched by the gods of cinema. That are not gods at all, in a cinema that doesn’t exist. Which makes the bewitching even deadlier.

   These are the things I’m thinking as I pedal through the dust storm, winds blowing furiously, thirty forty miles an hour, the sky the color of dust, the clouds a smoggy reddishbrown, and I must confess to casting myself as cinematic with my turned backwards baseball cap, aviator glasses, and blue surgical mask, a girl on a bike braving insurmountable odds.

   Apocalypse, as a genre, has become primary cinema within us. Viewer discretion advised.

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About John Biscello

Originally from Brooklyn, NY, novelist, poet, performer, playwright and filmmaker, John Biscello, has lived in the high-desert grunge-wonderland of Taos, New Mexico since 2001. He is the author of six novels, Broken Land, a Brooklyn Tale, Raking the Dust, Nocturne Variations, No Man’s Brooklyn, The Last Furies, and No One Dreams in Color; a collection of stories, Freeze Tag, two poetry collections, Arclight and Moonglow on Mercy Street; and a fable, The Jackdaw and the Doll, illustrated by Izumi Yokoyama. He also adapted classic fables, which were paired with the vintage illustrations of artist, Paul Bransom, for the collection: Once Upon a Time, Classic Fables Reimagined. His plays have been staged and performed both nationally and internationally.
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