If I Wasn't Smelling Gas

I’m above them. Bouncing on my tiny circus bike tires. Front wheel, then back. Bunny hopping from one roof edge to another. Spinning without holding my handlebars. Pedaling through their hanging laundry and leaving black marks on their ventilation hoods.

They’re amazed. Mouths wide open. But they still don’t quite see that I’m impossible. So I crank up some speed and jump through high air toward the opposing roof top. Backflip with half twist and I land on my front wheel, stopping like this to pulse with the pressure reverberations in the tire as the villagers gasp with sky tilted faces. 

They all are so astonished at what I can do on my little bicycle. And the danger. What if I fell? No, he can’t really be riding on top of the telephone wire like that! Look, now he’s riding straight up that old television antenna. Run get your brother!

I go on like this for another half hour, but these people are incredibly accommodating. Whatever I do, I remain just amazing. Even as I side spring between chimney tops, unbolting and exchanging my two wheels midair, I’m still not impossible.

And so I start messing with their natural laws. Their physics. It’s not just bike tricks anymore. I make a whole building disappear. They gasp, scream, weep and yet soon have decided there had never really been a building there.

Never Really has indeed left their world but it’s still close by; I just pulled it onto my side of the curtain a bit. I let go and it plucks back. The building reappears. The people gasp, scream, weep and yet soon have always remembered that building being there.

I’m starting to worry they’ll tire me out. Whatever I try, I’m only amazing. Not impossible. They think I’m entertainment but I’m a messenger, a messenger with a warning. I’m trying to first show them that I’m not from their world so they will listen closely to what I have to say. I’m here from my adjacent world, interfering in theirs only because I smell gas. They’re doing something wrong. If they blow up their world, the windows of mine could shatter. I’m just a concerned neighbor. I wouldn’t be over here if I wasn’t smelling gas.