An Urgency Inherit to Children - short story

Samuel took a step forward after he had stopped his bike on the neighborhood path.  He straddled the foundation of his bicycle and gripped the handle bars as he scooted his feet along the pavement.  His fist were tight and his eyes glued forward where his feet were bringing him.   He'd never seen a dead person before and now there was one laying out across the path obstructing most of the way.   Had he been younger than he was, or older he may have reacted differently but he looked on then with a genuine albeit morbid curiosity.  It was unmistakable that there was no life within the corpse of the man, he was pale and stiff eyes faded into gray clouds of mist.   Samuel lifted a leg over his bike and let it fall to his opposite side just as he neared the man's mess of floating hair.   It had been picked up in the breeze a gray yellow lifted and dropped all at once so that it appeared to levitate.

He squatted in front of the man and cocked his neck to crane a look at his expressionless gaze.   It could not have been painful whatever it was that befell him, there was a serenity to it.   A look that said he had been content with his moments up until then, and Samuel thought on that old expression of life passing before a persons eyes before they had breathed their last breath.  At the angle Samuel peered the man's face appeared upside down, the ever changing shadows of the floating hairs on his forehead.   Samuel stood back up, and looked from one end of the bike path to the other, and saw no signs of passerby.   It was early morning then, the sun making its progression to its highest point in the sky but not quite there.  Then as if become with shock Samuel hurried back to his bike and rode back toward his house.

The trees whipped passed him as he pushed one foot on each pedal with a harsh and determined move of his leg.  His knees rose in bends, and straightened at speeds he hadn't fathomed he could reach.   The ending of the path seemed so far then, so completely foreign to him that he might as well have been traversing some foreign desert or navigating the amazon without a guide.   He knew though that home was forward, and that the body was behind him.  The middle aged man staring at the storm encroaching upon his iris'.   

Then an end.   Samuel slowed himself a little as he approached the street, the wisp of cars sneaking away in front of him, their bodies existing for a minute amount of time as if to say they hadn't existed at all and growing in size from matchbox size to their rhinoceros width bodies.  The stop sign to expanding its red hexagon body and white lettering:  STOP.  Samuel obeyed and realized he had been sweating immensely all over his t-shirt.   He wiped it away at the top of his forehead along his hair line, the back of his hand glistening with the run off like grease in the sunlight.   His breathing was labored, and he coughed from a pain of sharpness in his throat.  The whipping cars continued on by and he waited but felt the tendril hands of some monster encroaching upon his shoulder.  The man dead and forgotten on the pavement some mile or two behind him.  The cars kept going.   They didn't see him, they didn't acknowledge him all of those commuters on their way to work, and school.  On their ways to responsibilities and errands.  On their way to relaxations.

Then a lull, a moment of peace upon the street.   Samuel prepped himself and peddled across throwing his look to left and right over and over the entire way just in case some magical truck emerged to destroy him.   And as he pushed on forward he felt the talons on his neck lose grip and lose ground.   And then he was home.

He dropped his bike in the yard  and it clattered as its chain slapped against its metal bars.  He'd leapt from it and stumbled through the grass almost falling, and out of breath but he ran for the door and opened and slammed it behind him.  His bike alone in the grass obscured and forgotten.   Passed the kitchen and passed the living room he ran down the corridor to his parents bed side and he shook his mother awake.   She groaned and chastised him for the interruption to her dreaming, and he lamented, "There's a dad man on the bike path.   Really dead."  His breath was caught in the roof of his mouth and the sweat dripped off from his forehead.  But she tossed in her bed and moved her face away from his.   His father too hushed him, and Samuel gave up and returned to his room deciding that he'd be better to wake up twice to forget the whole affair as in dreams.