Gerry stands on the pedals of her bike, rides a slow, controlled slalom down the hill, forces the cars behind her to change lanes.
Her muscles shudder with the effort. The horn blares make her smile.
At the bottom of the hill, she tucks as the traffic light slips to amber, swerves around a car turning right.
Nancy Lee’s The Age
(M&S, 2014)
Gearing up on her bicycle she left the dreariness of it behind, heading downtown.
When she made the intersection at Runnymede, the glow was still on her body, searing and damp.The afternoon light was sharp for spring.
The sun coming west was dead angled at her head as she rode east, chipping between cars, crazily challenging red lights. […]
As fast as she was riding, she could still make out the particularity of each object or person she saw, so acute this searing light around her, tingling her skin.
Could anyone see her? drenched in lightning?
Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For
(Random House Canada, 2005)
That is uncanny – makes you wonder whether there was some thought transference going on when they wrote these books. Or were they both in the same creative writing class…
Part of the reason that I remembered the passage in Brand’s novel was because I loved the way that she had captured that feeling of power-freedom-joy on a bicycle, so I was pleased to find the same feeling in Nancy Lee’s novel.