Thaddeus Rutkowski – Red Flag

Rutkowski LE P&W 2 Nov-Dec 2024

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Two November-December 2024

Red Flag and Two Bicycles, flash fiction by Thaddeus Rutkowski.


Red Flag

 I heard my father moving around in his workspace—an upstairs room in the back of the house. I looked in and saw he was setting up a miniature racetrack. The track was shaped like a warped oval and lay on a platform made of particleboard. He had built “hills” out of papier-mâché and had painted the entire landscape with greens, browns and yellows. A starting gate anchored the track, and red, green, and yellow signal flags lay next to the gate. He was crouching over an electrical transformer and holding a joystick. One tiny car was rolling slowly around the track. As I stepped toward him, he rose and balanced on his knees. He held his arms out like a crossing guard. “Stay back,” he said. “You have to let the car pass.”

He pushed a button, and the tiny car picked up speed and buzzed around the track. “Go easy,” he said.

“I can do it,” I said.

I coaxed a car around the track as he watched. He didn’t say anything, and his silence made me uncomfortable. Presently, he left me alone in the room.

I practiced my racing technique. I set a car in its slot and pushed the control button. The car picked up a charge through its metal “shoes” and shot forward. My strategy was to slow the car before turns, then accelerate going around. The back of the vehicle fishtailed, but the front, with its pin in a groove, stayed on course. When the car approached the straight stretches, I squeezed the power button all the way down, and the motorized toy hissed along.

My brother and sister, both younger, came into the racetrack room. “We want to try,” they said.

There were two control sticks, and they each took one. I picked up the green flag from the starting gate and waved it. Their cars took off like jackrabbits.

“Whoa!” my brother said.

“Woo-hoo!” my sister echoed.

I picked up the yellow flag and waved it.

“What does that mean?” my brother said.

“Warning!” I said, but I didn’t get the word out before my siblings’ cars left their slots, flew off the track, and tumbled across the floor.

“I hit something,” my sister said.

“You need another flag,” my brother said, “for ‘Debris on the road.’ ”

“Nothing on the road,” I said. “You were going too fast.”

We retrieved the crashed cars and put them back in their grooves, and my siblings grabbed the controls for another round. I waved the green flag. The cars completed a circuit and started another. “I need to make a pit stop,” my brother said.

“The pit stop is closed,” I said, but I had no flag for that.

I waved the red flag—I was tired of watching. The cars ended in a photo finish, but we had no camera. My brother and sister left the raceway.

I looked around the small space. I found a crate filled with empty wine bottles, all with the same label, but no actual wine. Many canvases were stacked on the floor, with their images facing the wall. An empty easel stood next to a worktable. On the table there was a large can that held loose tobacco for cigarettes, but no rolling papers—I’d taken them. I had my own stash in my room.


Two Bicycles

A boy’s bicycle has been locked at a street rack for months. I see it there every time I park my own bike, across from the grocery store. It is a specialized bike, painted white with blue trim, with a shock suspension and wide tires, for riding off road. The bike was once new, without scratches or dents, but it has been sitting outside, and many of its parts are rusted. The chain and gear sprockets are orange with corrosion. The hand grips are missing, stolen by scavengers. Surprisingly, its saddle is still attached.

What happened to the boy who owned the bicycle? Why would he leave it on the street? If he wanted to get rid of it, he shouldn’t have locked it. Someone would have taken it gladly. But if he wanted to keep it, he should have come to retrieve it. Maybe he locked the bike and was himself taken, by someone to somewhere. Someone who had no use for the bike, but had use for the boy.

Lately, an adult bike has joined the boy’s bike at the street rack. Someone has abandoned the taller, English-style bike, for reasons unknown. Who was the adult who owned the bike, and why did he or she leave it? The brown-colored bike itself is in pretty good shape, with all of its parts intact, though it wasn’t new when it was left. I doubt the adult who owned the bike knew the boy, but the two bikes, one large and one small, seem to belong together.

Over the city’s evolution, vandals will salvage what they can. Both bikes will vanish, piece by piece—first the saddles, then the wheels, then the frames. No one will take the locks and chains—they are too strong to steal. Padlocked chains will lie on the sidewalk like coiled snakes beneath the parking posts.

But for now the bikes seem to be embracing—remnants of an adult and a child, unable to leave their anchors.


© Thaddeus Rutkowski

Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania. He is the author of eight books of prose and poetry, most recently Safe Colors, a novel in short fictions. His novel Haywire won the members’ choice award from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He teaches at Medgar Evers College, Columbia University, and a YMCA and received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

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