The Story of Her Holding an Orange by Milos Bogetic Page B

some policy violations and told me that if I biked to a mid-point between the two towns, I could catch another bus that’d take me home. This meant that I’d have to go back on the bike trail, at night at that. Since my brilliant plan was to take only a few bucks with me, neither a hotel nor a cab were options. Spending the night roaming around the unfamiliar city or biking back through the foggy road were the only two things I could do. Again, I’m a fucking moron, but I convinced myself that the man on the trail was perfectly normal and probably wouldn’t be there when I returned. I decided to bike. 
    When I entered the bike path, my heartbeat involuntarily sped up. I just felt… uneasy. Knowing that I’d reached a point of no return, I shook my head and kept plowing through the fog. A mile or two on the road, I noticed something on the ground ahead. This was strange since the trail maintenance crew was more than diligent when cleaning the trash, and you could hardly see any garbage, especially on the path itself. I slowed down. The thing on the ground was a GI Joe action figure. It looked nearly new. I figured that some kid had dropped it while biking with his dad. I sat back on my bike and kept going. Another mile or so, I noticed something else lying on the ground. At that point, I knew something was wrong. No parent would let his or her kid litter that much. Getting closer to the thing, I recognized what it was. A basketball. Not just any basketball, a chess-themed basketball.
    Now, when I was a kid, basketball was my whole life. I played it, watched it, practiced it, you know, lived it, basically. I was out-of-this-world excited when my city organized a basketball tournament. I gathered the best team I could find and had many sleepless nights replaying all possible scenarios in my head. When the game day arrived, we were notified that only two teams in our category had showed up, which meant that we’d be getting awards and gifts whether we won or lost. Apparently, my team wasn’t as good as I dreamt it to be, so we got our asses kicked. Nice thing was, though, that we got to go to the sports store and choose an item up to a certain price. All of my friends chose jerseys, shoes, etc. My attention, however, was caught by a unique chessboard basketball. The ball had 64 squares on it, 32 black and 32 white. I’ve never seen something like that before, so at risk of being made fun of by my teammates, I chose that as my reward. The funny thing is, that ball was god-awfully designed, because playing with it for more than a few minutes would give me headaches. I guess that pattern was just not meant for a basketball. Since it was basically useless, and I still got made fun of for it, I decided to get rid of the ball. One day, on my way home, as I was crossing a bridge, I kicked it as hard as I could into the river and watched it float away.
    Twelve years later, I was holding the exact same ball in my hands, five thousand miles away from that bridge. 
    Sometimes, when I’m under a great deal of stress (or fear), my legs start shaking. Well, at that moment, my legs wouldn’t move. My arms gave up too, so I dropped the ball and watched it roll off the trail. Realizing that I could be in serious danger, I forced myself to start moving. Remember how I said that I had reached the point of not giving a fuck? Well, apparently, finding the ball that my 15-year-old self had abandoned on the other side of the globe more than a decade ago did wonders. When I got back on the bike, my apathy was replaced by anger. I was furious. I wanted to hurt the people who were fucking with my life. I wanted to scream. Instead of all that, I started biking, using my anger to drive the pedals as hard as I could. 
    After a mile or so, I spotted another object on the path. When I got close, I realized it was just a piece of wet newspaper. Not believing in coincidences, I stopped and looked at it. It was a newspaper from the college town I