Life is Like a Wheel
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

Part 1

I went to the hospital to gloat. It sounds a shitty thing now. Why do people do that? Gloating seems like the worst thing; not just enjoying the misfortune of others (there is a word for that) but showing it … even letting the victim see your smug satisfaction.

But even if he had some of the Hun with him, I knew I could just grin at them. There is security in the hospital, and no weapons allowed. Still, I took off my Angels of Death colors before I went in. There is no sense in getting the staff excited. I wanted to get to his bedside. I wanted him to see me. I wanted him to see the man who caused his pain, smiling.

Because it was me. I ran him off the road. I saw him on his own whizz by me, and I braked hard and spun my drive wheel to catch him. I got close to him. He turned and saw me. I throttled back a little, so as to charge him in a wheel stand. I had seen it done before. I was good at wheel stands but I had never done that.

Why? Because he is of the Raging Hun gang and I am an Angel of Death. There is no other better reason. And he was as high up in his gang as I am in mine. In fact I was the treasurer. Because I was the smart one, I handled the money. Because I was the smart one I had ached to show my chops and take out one of the rival gang.

And there he was, lying in the bed. He was bruised and had his upper body naked with a heart monitor attached. His lower body was covered, and tube collecting urine sat at the foot of the bed.

He looked up at me. I was expecting fury in his eyes, but there was just sadness.

“I saw it was you, John.” That is what he said. He called me John. My gang name is Zook. Everybody calls me Zook, except my mother.

“Where are your gang pals?” I said. “Here all alone? You sad fuck.”

“I won’t be seeing them again,” he said. It was not despair on his face – just a morose resignation. “I don’t qualify anymore. I am not sure if that’s what you wanted, but I won’t be going back to the Hun anytime soon.”

“Oh yeah – why is that?” I was not curious, just sneering.

“I have lost my nuts,” he said, just as clear and as simple as that. “The gas cap de-sleeved my cock and opened my sack and all that matters is gone.”

Enemy or not, when you hear something like that, you wince.

“They can fix you,” I said. It was just a reaction, but it was not what I was there for. I was not there for sympathy or encouragement; I was there to gloat.

“They say that they can give me a hole to piss out of and a nubbin to squeeze that might give me pleasure, but there is nothing much to build on. Whether intended or not, you have rendered me sexless. I am no longer a man. They all know it – the Hun – and now you do too. I am out. Homeless, friendless, causeless.”

Who cannot be affected by that? It was just me and him. Suddenly I was aware that this guy was no worthy adversary. He was not a big guy and somehow, he did look like what he said he was – sexless.

“I’m an Angel and you are Hun, or you were.” It was my way of explaining everything, even though those words meant nothing.

“Sure,” he said. “I understand. There are no hard feelings.” Then he forced a smile and said: “For me there never will be any hard feelings ever again.”

Something inside me broke. Don’t ask me what. Here was a guy lying in a hospital bed staring at the man who had emasculated him, forgiving almost, and making light of what must be the single greatest tragedy a man can suffer.

“Maybe I can offer you something,” I said. “Just between me and you. Just somewhere to stay when you get out of this place. It’s a house we have bought, but the guys know nothing about it and I don’t want them to. I have my reasons. It needs a caretaker. Just for a while.”

“Why would you feel that you owe me anything?” he asked.

“I don’t,” I said. “If you go there and ask for a bullet in your head, I will do that. You have suffered enough. Just don’t tell anybody.”

“Give me the address and I will keep the secret,” he said. So I did, and he did.

On the way out of the hospital a doctor stopped me to ask if I was of his family.

“No,” I said. “I am just a business associate. But I am concerned about him.” It seemed an odd thing to say. Why would I be? But I was.

“I wish there was more we could do,” she said. “We had to be honest. He will never function as a man. We could do some things to give him some functionality, but he seems to understand that this would not be enough. Obviously I am a woman, so perhaps I cannot relate as well as I should …”.

“If he was a woman, he would not need a penis,” I said, cutting her short.

“If he was a woman, we could repair the genitals quite easily,” she said. “But he is not a woman.”

“What could you do?” I asked. I was just curious. Of course I had heard of sex-change surgery. Who hasn’t? How much of his junk was destroyed? How to do this thing?

“We could build external genitals with what we have there and use a piece of gut to build a vagina,” she said. “We have an expert right here – a surgeon familiar with the procedure. But such a procedure can only be performed on transgender patients.”

“But he is transgender. He always has been. I will talk to him.”

Who knows why I said this. I suppose that I just wanted to keep his options open. He seemed so lost. It was as I had hinted to him. If he had died of his injuries on the roadside, or if I had stopped to put a bullet in his head, or smothered him in his hospital bed with a pillow, it would have been better for him. He was not a man and seemed doomed to live alone in some middle world.

Not matter how much I must have said to him about not having any obligation, I knew that I had. That was why I gave him the address. But why that? Why not a wad of cash? I had one in my jacket. I could have said: “Hey Buddy. My bad. Drink yourself to death.” But I didn’t. I gave him a place where I would see him again. I wanted to see him recover from what I had done to him.

I walked back up the corridor to his room.

“Can’t stay away?” he said. “I guess a freak show can be interesting.”

“You don’t have to be a freak,” I said. “I have just spoken to your doctor. There is another option for you.”

Part 2

It is a sensible precaution. A safe house you can call it. Somewhere that is secure in the event that there is a crisis, such as a murder that could see the leadership of the gang facing lengthy prison terms. It needs to be isolated but not so isolated that it cannot be easily reached. It needs to be private but near enough to a population centre to allow it to be easily serviced and accessed. But most of all, it needs to be unknown. Unknown to police, unknown to rivals, even unknown to members of the gang. If the location is known, news will spread. If it is regularly used, news will spread. Details of the safe house need only be known to the person who bought it, and the person who cares for it.

I can remember riding up there on that July afternoon. I would normally drive the truck, but I knew that she well provisioned, so I rode up on my bike.

The moment I got through the trees screening the place from the road I could see the house in the distance, and I could see the work that she had done. I had to smile. A white picket fence in the front to protect the flowers that she had planted from the stock in the field out front. It made me want to get to her even more. I opened the throttle and the unsealed road spat out the back as I accelerated.

She could then hear the engine and step onto the porch. I had told her I was coming but I liked to think that she always looked like that, in her floral dress with her hair shining in the sun, her perfect blonde soft curls that she knew I loved.

She just leaned on the post smiling; waiting for me to flick out the stand and dismount; waiting for me to come up the steps drinking her in as I did; waiting for me to get close to her.

She grabbed the zipper on my jacket and pulled so that she could grab the leather and pull me to her kissing me hungrily. A man can never know the craving and violence of a woman who was once a man until they have had one.

“Let’s go to bed,” she said.

“Fuck yes,” I said. “I am sorry Darling, but I can’t stay over this time; I have just brought some more cash for the grab bags.”

She was not listening. She was clawing at my clothes, longing to have me naked before her as I wanted her. We awkwardly struggled through the doorway in an embrace. We knew that we would never make it upstairs. Whenever I came to the house, the first fuck was on the table or the rug in the living room, only steps from the front door.

The dress was on the floor and she was the woman I wanted her to be. The face with all the masculinity ground off with the surgeon’s supreme skill, perfect breasts formed by the hormones and backed by subtle implants, and the pussy – shaved and as smooth and soft as the rest or her would always be. It seemed to quiver as if the lips of it were mouthing to me to silence them with my turgid cock.

“Get that inside me,” she commanded. I am a slave to her. She is my creation and yet it seems that I serve her. I must comply.

Her gasp is the thing. Half way between the squeal of a little girl and the grunt of a man truly satisfied. But when I plough her she is all woman, with those painted lips pouting, and those glossy curls bouncing as her head rocks.

“Oh my God!” Is that her or me? It must be both of us; right to the point when all of time is suspended, broken by that tiny convulsion, and that enormous wave of pleasure.

“I swear every time is better than before,” she said.

A man just smiles at something like that. Women talk. Men do.

“I love the fence,” I said. “You must have been working hard.”

“I am not just a pretty face, as you know,” she said getting up and walking towards the table, my jizz running down her leg. “But I try.” She had a lipstick out and was repairing the damage of however many minutes of ferocious lip action had proceeded the act of sex.

“I am sorry, but I will drop the stuff and then clean up and then I have to go. But I will be back next week. I can’t stay away.”

“It’s a long ride for you,” she said. “I’ll put something to eat in the pannier on your bike while you take a shower.”

The safe was set in the concrete of the fireplace, accessed by pulling back the grate and cinderbox.

I took my shower but I remember that I was reluctant to wash the smell of her off my body. But I needed to be refreshed for the ride back. A safe house is not properly located close to the center of activities but needs to be reachable.

She was sitting on the porch painting her nails when I came down. I remember that she said: “I seem to be always painting.”

I kissed her. It was not the hungry kiss – it was the other kind. The kiss that says that we are one and that being apart is like tearing a body in two. A kiss of love, or that is what I thought.

I remember it all as if in happened in slow motion, just like they say it happens. I was on the dirt road before I even got to the seal. I was travelling at speed because I liked to ride that road that way – to leave with a roar and in a cloud of dust. But you need brakes as you get to the seal, and I had none.

Time slowed. I saw the forks buckle and I felt myself going forward. I remember the fuel cap. I had polished it that very morning. The chrome gleamed. It was far too big and heavy for the job it did. Far too proud of the fuel tank. I slid off the saddle and onto that tank and the shiny edges did their work, cutting me open from the navel down.

I remember lying there in the brush beside the road looking at the wreck with the back wheel still spinning. I was bleeding. There was a gash where my groin had been.

I would be better off dead.

You know what they say: The wheel turns. Life is like a wheel. What goes around comes around.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2021

Erin suggested this: “Life Like a Wheel" - after a run-in with a rival motorcycle gang Phillip is emasculated in an accident when Carl, the leader of the rival gang runs him off the road ... but true love will find a way...