Akis Linardos

I’m seven when Mom gifts me Bicyclops, and Father calls me a stupid shit for giving my bike a name.

But my friend enjoys his name. Bicyclops is appropriate, because he has one eye, dead-center between the handles—yellow with a gleaming eyelid he keeps shut around other people. The right handle is different, too: bulgy, enwrapped in purple cables, as if its plastic once boiled and froze in place.

When I tell Mom about the eye, she presses it, producing a wheezing honk. She then presses the patch covering my own missing right eye, and says eyes and sockets don’t honk, and that I better quit the creepy lies if I want to make friends at school.

I’m angry at Bicyclops for hiding, allowing Mom to call me a liar, but I soon realize I’m the fool. He is terrified people won’t understand being different. Only I understand, because I know what that’s like.

Mom once told me my right eye was taken as a toll. That gods lend souls to infants but they’re never gifts. Sacrifice is necessary, and lacking money she offered my body part instead.

Bicyclops says it’s hogwash. Life is not given nor borrowed. Life sprouts like apples on orchards and is stolen by hungry things for nourishment. I was the apple, Mom the orchard. Did that make Father the hungry thing?

My bike thinks otherwise. He thinks Father is like a gardener, trying to make Mom stronger by showering beer over her like watering a plant. And he beats her to make her bones snap and grow strong. These are the things Bicyclops tells me every night, when I sneak to the garage and lay by his cold wheels, allowing the click-click-clicking of his blinking eye lull me to sleep. The floor may be cold, and the smell of gas thick, but Mom’s screams can’t reach me here.

When I ask Bicyclops why his right handle is different, he tells me about his previous owner, whose father was a gardener. Inspired by pruning branches, the daughter chopped the legs and arms from her dolls expecting them to grow stronger. They didn’t. She enjoyed the abuse, but Bicyclops was too innocent to blame her. When she chopped off Bicyclops right handle with her father’s shears, she ran away in horror from something Bicyclops couldn’t understand. Poor bike had to nourish the sprouting handle on his own.

One night I ask Bicyclops, if pruning branches results in stronger ones, why has my eye not sprouted back?

He assured me the eye is growing, but it’s still too small to feel. Like a tomato seedling, it throws off shoots that will ripen and bulge.

I sure hope it does, but not as red and gross as a tomato. I hate tomatoes. I want it smooth and slick like a well-boiled egg.

Mom’s eyelids twitch and lips quiver when I mention I’m grateful she didn’t buy some expensive soul-less bike but adopted the discarded Bicyclops. Stupid me. Adults won’t understand, they never do.

How could I have known she didn’t buy it? Now suspicion that my fantasies have truth in them turns to dreadful certainty, and she wants to get rid of Bicyclops, calling him unholy, satanic. I have to clasp my bike tightly to stop her taking him away. But I can’t compete with adult strength, so I scream to the top of my lungs until she releases. She always buckles before my screams, because she wants to avoid gossiping neighbors.

But there’s no avoiding Father. He barges into the garage, demands explanation for disturbing his afternoon nap, and Mom points the finger at me. No, not at me—at Bicyclops in my embrace.

Father calls her delusional, but to my surprise he doesn’t hit her. He is amused, and grins at his own cruel humor: ‘If the bike really talks, let’s see if it bleeds, yeah?’

Mom retreats to the house, and I know not to scream with Father, because that always makes it worse. He yanks me off the bike, grabs Bicyclops by frame and saddle and shoves his foot between the wheel spokes. Nevermind how afraid I am of Father, I punch his leg to protect my friend. But a backhanded slap sends me sprawling on the floor, my tooth wounding my lip.

Pushing with his leg, pulling with his arms, the rusty frame snaps in two.

And now Father’s grin vanishes because his stupid joke turns to prophecy. The mangled bike gushes out viscous, sanguine liquid and Father panics and clumsily steps back, slipping on the pool of bike-blood. His head meets the floor with a gut-wrenching crack.

Bicyclops might not be human, but he is a child like me, just more naive. Assuming the best in people, he still thinks Father pruned him to make him stronger. Why else would he sacrifice himself? A bike cannot understand adults that lose their balance.

His saddle-half quickly wrinkles and smells like spoiled fruit, while the one connected to his eye grows again, the wounded pipe shoots out purple cables as muscles form in bubbles at the stem. But pruned branches need nourishment to grow strong, so I keep the garage door shut and Father’s body tucked close to Bicyclops, so the cables can reach it.

Mom visits the garage once and never again. She learned from Father to accept things that unsettle her instead of trying to stop them, which for once works in my favor.

I keep Bicyclops company at all times. This is a time for healing and he needs his friend. I’ve pulled my mattress downstairs and let the slurping sounds of Bicyclops lull me to sleep at night as I watch the shadows of his growing muscles.

I smile, happy to see my friend healing. Happy my Father is of use to something positive for once. And happy to see my bike excited to try on new shapes. Because the pruned parts don’t grow back quite the same.

In a cove of a Greek island, Akis was born a sane infant, but has since then grown to enter the chaotic world of adults—a choice he deeply regrets. Trying to gorge himself on this unlikely reality, he has lived in various European countries throughout his scientific career. He now studies biomedical AI, hoping there’s something less dystopian to come from this tech. His stories delve both into wholesome worlds and ones of extreme darkness. Read more from him in Apex, Dread Machine, Flame Tree and numerous anthologies. Visit his website for details: https://linktr.ee/akislinardos

I’m not supposed to be hanging out with a human, but Mother can’t tell while she’s in sleep mode. When I wake in my deck chair, she is still asleep in hers—the skin receded from her shoulders and scalp to reveal the solar-paneled skeleton beneath. Once the nanobodies expand my body enough to be an adult android, I’ll also need to sleep for long hours during the day to recharge my energy. Until then, this window of time between my awakening and hers is the perfect gap to meet with my friend in secret.

He’s walking on the other side of the street. He has a crooked nose, brown skin, and a body so thin I always imagined a strong wind could carry him away. So fragile, even for a human. Or a ‘devourer,’ as Mother and most androids would call him.

I never saw him that way. Taka loves all things, and he eats no more than he has to. Nature left him no choice.

I leap over the railings and land in front of him. “Hey, Taka.”

“Hey, Goro. Ready to carve?”

I nod vigorously and take his warm, soft hand as he leads me to his home. The streets are busy with androids and humans walking in segregated rows, and I’m acutely aware of the distasteful glances they throw our way.

They can tell by our gait, by the gleam of solar panels at the corners of my bare scalp, by the way Taka breathes that we are different. They don’t understand our friendship. Taka listens to me. We share secrets.

He teaches me carving. We have fun together. What does the skeleton beneath matter?

Taka bravely defies the world around him, but I keep my head down. I steal furtive glances of the passers-by, dreading to catch a glimpse of those zealot androids known to assault humans on sight—they call themselves

Solarminders, wear a label of a silver sun. I’m being paranoid though. These androids have specific territories they operate in—alleys populated solely by other androids where no one would bat an eye. No way they’ll be here in the neutral areas.

We finally reach Taka’s place and shut the door on the hostile din outside. There’s tatami on the floor, and it makes crunching sounds against my tough feet—like walking atop the crust of freshly baked bread. A scent of beef ramen and a clamor of utensils come from the kitchen. We shouldn’t be seen together, but with his mother busy cooking, we have enough time to work on the carving if we work on the shed outside. Taka learned to carve wood from his father and inherited all the tools he needed to continue the craft—a series of whittling knives with handles ten times the blade size.

Taka picks two blocks of limewood—one for him, one for me—and we go to the shed. It’s dusty, filled with shelves hosting buckets, sprays and old knives. He lays the tools on a table covered by a blue sheet for us to work. Not work, not really. It’s more like play. I love the feel of dead wood peeling away at the push of the knife, the visions of pretty things taking shape in my hands. We have an elephant, a dwarf, and a fox from previous times.

“Let’s make a kodama today,” Taka says.

“What about an owl?”

“Or perhaps a red panda?”

“Or a totem with monkey faces?”

“All of them!”

I smile. “You take the kodama. I’ll do the owl first.”

We nod at each other and get to work. Draw the design on paper, attach the paper on the wood, and finally the best part: push the blade on the wood and peel away flakes. Shhhk, shhhk. Part of me always expects to find something at the wood’s core, like if I peel away enough, a solar-paneled skeleton will reveal itself. And once it touches the sunlight, the carving I make will be alive, and the owl will fly away. It makes me think of my own body as a woodblock, and now I imagine Mother popping up from behind me saying, See, Goro? All things should harvest energy from the sun. Not survive at the expense of others.

As soon as I finish the beak, a shriek erupts behind us. Taka’s mother has puffy bags below her eyes, and something about the way she glares in my direction makes me think crows will start flying from the hoops of her sleeves to peck at my scalp.

“What is he doing here?” she asks.

“We were just carving. Didn’t mean no harm by it,” Taka says.

“No harm? Do you know what they’ll do to people like us if they find him here? Do you want to have your family accused of abduction?”

Why do adults act like that? Once, my mother humiliated Taka when she caught me hanging out with him on the streets. Called him street urchin and a plague to the planet. His mother looks at me as if I’m some dangerous animal that escaped from the zoo. All I want is to hang out with my friend. Why can’t they leave us in peace?

Taka attempts to defend our actions further, but I stand, bow, and say “I’m sorry for any distress I caused you Mrs. Bencraft. I will leave now.”

I cross the threshold to the outside world, knowing Mrs. Bencraft’s is glaring at the back of my neck.

Bicyclops, My Pruned Friend

Solar-Powered Buddies