The Gnat
I braced myself for the hill I was about to take on. Lori, Chuck’s mom,
dropped our bikes onto the asphalt road, and beckoned for us to go.
“Alright boys, go single file down the hill and be careful!” She said.
The hill at Indian Caves was treacherous; it may have not looked that way, but
the speed you were able to achieve and the curve in the middle of the hill made it very dangerous to conquer. Chuck took of down the hill, and because he had faced it multiple times, he knew what to do. After Chuck took off, Ty began his descent down the hill, but that is when the trouble started.
I hopped on my bike and followed Ty, and then Stan started his final trip on the hill after me. All was well and we were blazing down the hill, until the gnat arrived. Now, it was just a little gnat, but to Ty it was Satan incarnate. The gnat grazed the eyelid of Ty. To everyone else, it would’ve been a little bug that hit their eye, but they would have thought nothing of it and kept going down the hill. But to Ty, this diabolical, satanic gnat utterly inhibited his eyesight and obviously his decision making, because he slammed on his brakes. Keep in mind, we were going around 35 MPH down this asphalt road, so this was an awful decision. I had no choice but to crank my handlebars to the right so I could barely sneak past him. I managed to get by him safely, but Stan wasn’t so lucky. He was right behind me, so he had nowhere to go if Ty and I were both covering the road. He slammed his brakes, but because we were on the curve, he had to turn to the left. We all know what happens when you are going that fast and are braking and turning… you fishtail. I looked behind me, and sure enough, Stan’s bike was fishtailing. But it didn’t stop there. He continued fishtailing and the tires floated up in the air, as he tried to stay on the road, moving the handlebars to the left. Finally, he lost control of the bike. His whole body flipped over, and his arms flailed upwards, spinning uncontrollably, as the gravity slowly pulled him back towards the ground. Stan smashed into the curb with a thump, sliding onto the grass, rolling over multiple times. Leaves and dirt flew everywhere, and skin was slowly being ripped off of Stan’s body, as his momentum started to slow down gradually.
I came to a stop as fast as I could, and threw my bike to the side, running up
the hill. Ty, on the other hand, did not lift a finger to help Stan. He saw everything that happened to Stan, but yet did not stop. Ty took one look at his malicious transgression he had committed onto Stan, and shamefully kept going down the hill.
“Stan!” I yelled, coming to see if he was okay.
It was clear that he was not. A scrape the color of a raspberry was forming on
his knee. His shoe was ripped open, and his jeans had holes all over them from the contact with the asphalt. Stan was covered in dirt and leaves, and was laying down, almost lifelessly.
Lori was driving down the hill behind us, and she saw the injustice Ty had
done to Stan. We quickly loaded up the bikes, so we could drive back to camp and tend to Stan’s fatal wounds, at the hand of Ty Donovan. We drove back to camp, wondering why Ty had slammed on his brakes in the middle of the hill.
“A speck of dust came into my eye!” He wailed. “Or maybe it was a gnat, I
don’t know!”
Naturally, we blamed Ty for Stan’s battle scars. He begged for mercy, claiming
he did nothing wrong.
“Ty, you slammed on the brakes while we were going down the hill! That was
completely your fault!” Chuck exclaimed.
Despite our evidence, Ty could never admit his wrongdoing. To him, and I
quote, all he did was give his brakes a little “love tap.”
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