The Cycle Cycle

I have a habit of buying brand-new, highly desirable (deceivingly cheap) bikes. Other people have a habit of stealing them.

It started when the saddle from my Boyfriend's bike went missing. To be honest that wasn't so tragic a loss. It allowed him to discover an enjoyable form of transport he may not otherwise have known -- walking. However, when his wheels disappeared one by one it got worrying. What kind of thief walks around with a monkey wrench in his pocket?

Then the back wheel was taken from my bike.

Now, my bike is not in the best condition despite attempts to maintain it. I have thrown buckets of oil over it, calibrated the brakes to maximum squeakiness, and pumped the tyres to abdomen hardness. My efforts however have been disappointing. I know now how my parents felt raising me.

But despite this someone stole a part of it

The back wheel is the hardest part to remove, but someone took it in the black of night. Yet they left the front wheel, the saddle and the handlebars.

Why would anyone need a back wheel so badly that they would risk jail and nasty oil stains? Why did they need two wheels and a saddle from my boyfriend's bike but only one wheel from mine?

I have thought it through carefully and have come, logically, to the following conclusion.

An evil scientist is at work. Someone with an all in one bike tool is trying to create the ultimate hybrid-cycle -- a three wheel creation with one in front and two driven wheels behind. It is designed to seat a human rider, hence the saddle, yet the lack of handlebars suggest it is an intelligent bike that can steer itself by varying the speed of the rear wheels individually. However, its own intelligence will alienate it from other bicycles and it will be forced into isolation. Lonely and misunderstood by its peers it will harbour resentment for the one that brought it life and all who mocked it. As the months pass in solitude, rust will corrode its frame and hatred its heart, swelling its repulsiveness until it is feared by all on earth. Its wrath will increase until finally, with no one to love it or tell it no, it will rampage all bicycles, mopeds and cars in the world, shredding the technological age to scrap in its gears. And as a grizzly end, it will turn on its creator and all his kind in an inferno of oil and blood.

To think that my little pushbike, rusty, overused and underloved, should be part of such a detestable thing! It brings a tear to my eye.

But yesterday, I woke up to discover both our bikes, or what was left of them, missing. There was no evidence they had ever existed, as if they were spirited away to another dimension or removed from public record by the FBI. Maybe then things aren't as bad as I thought.

I believe, or I hope, that the great bicycle rapture has come and they have been taken to a better place. With their parts returned, they frolic, rust free, on the heavenly cycle path for eternity,

That, or they've been melted down and sold as scrap metal.