Aesthetic Writing Assignment. An excerpt

The south farms lie on flat, brownish-gray expanses under a speckled January sky, a matte of uneven, wispy whitish clouds, like fresh snow, except trampled upon by a thousand footsteps, now muddled and imperfect. They are divided into squares by strips of dark asphalt that, put in a long line, disappear into the horizon. They meet at crossroads and depart, meeting only again after multiples of miles. I pedaled along one of them one Saturday on a whim, chugging along under clinging layers of lycra and fleece. The wind blows through the vents in my helmet, cooling some spots of my head while leaving other bits of my tussled, untouched hair lukewarm. I extend my sinewy left leg and contract my equally slim right leg in smooth symphonic synchrony causing the series of silvery steel slender tubes beneath me to lurch forward. My bare hands are surrounded in wool and mesh, themselves surrounding the textured wrap of cork that themselves twist around bare black metal that stick out like bull’s horns, ready to strike, impaling the next thing that gets in it’s way. Save for a few automobiles that zoom past the sleepy prairie, there’s not a soul. The desolation reveals a charred stump of a mighty tree that, by virtue of once being the tallest thing around, was struck by lightning and felled in an instant, preserved into an anthill or an organic stalagmite of bark and burned wood. The cold inches towards my feet. In matters of minutes, they bear the brunt of shoes designed for warm weather and for being unwrapped, naked swaths of fake leather and heavy fabric on a platform of studded plastic clipped into a spinning metal contraption. Minutes linger like hours of dancing barefoot in the snow, and I pray for sheaths of warm woven polyester like large socks to cover my feet. I’m hunched over, my chest nearly parallel with the top tube, at an almost right-angle to the invisible line that extends from my immobile center to the rotating, round thing beneath me that, unconnected, could be a torture implement, and could possibly have the same effect, but instead pushes and pulls the pulsating pulley of a chain to another sharp-toothed thing that is tightly secured, unslipping to another round, shrunken Ferris wheel of a thing surrounded in hard, worn, and slightly smooth rubber held taut by trapped tenses of turgid air.

Oh what divine contraption, sent down from the sky to sit beneath my padded posterior. My feet are now numb

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