Euclidean Rickshaw
(This is a passage I wrote for an assignment in a writing class. It's my first ever attempt at creative writing. The assignment was to write a passage that was sensorially evocative. See what you think.)

Sometime around noon it began to snow. But only barely. An elusive snow. Scattered flakes, each drifting down alone, disappearing as soon as they landed on the dusty playa. The watchmaker pedaled on, seemingly oblivious to the new precipitation. He never stuck out his tongue to catch a snowflake. He never shifted his gaze from the endless flat desert in front of him. And he certainly never stopped pedaling – never strayed from his slow, steady cadence. Oblivious to the snow. Oblivious to the cold. Oblivious to the faint sulfur smell of the playa dust. Oblivious to his own body – mouth dry, lips cracked, tongue swollen, legs aching, arthritis slowly baking his knuckles around the handlebars. Oblivious to everything except the creaking of the right rear hub.

Behind him, in the back of the rickshaw, the corpse of an ancient grandfather clock lay stiffly sprawled across the passenger seat. Cast iron feet braced against the gunnel of the floorboard; wooden back slanting across the edge of the seat; rigid shoulder leaning heavily on the armrest; lifeless face staring blindly skyward at the falling snow, the hands having long ago ground to a halt at 2:48.

The rickshaw itself was not much younger than the clock it carried – its wood cracked, its paint chipped, its chrome rusted, its canopy frayed. Something mechanical had given out years ago in the hub of the right rear wheel. Once per revolution the hub made a wheezy sort of scraping, creaking, grinding noise. Each turn of the rickshaw’s pedals drove one revolution of the creaking wheel. The watchmaker kept a perfect rhythm. Thirty creaks each minute, 750 creaks each mile, 1800 creaks each hour. The watchmaker counted every creak as he rode.

After three thousand creaks the midday scattering of flakes had grown into something more substantial. By early afternoon it was snowing hard. Not a storm exactly. There was no wind, no passion. Just a heavy blanket of snow drifting groundward, each creaking noise marking another six inches of descent. Billions of flakes landing on the playa between each creak, billions more landing on their predecessors, accumulating another inch of snow on the ground every hour.  

After eight thousand creaks a full four inches of snow had accumulated on the ground. If the watchmaker had been a man given to imagination it would not have been hard to envision the snow covered playa as a perfect white Euclidean plain, gradually being bisected by the tracks from the rickshaw’s tires. Tracks stretching back to infinity, slowly being drawn forward across the page, the tiny red dot of the rickshaw like the tip of some invisible pen. But the watchmaker was not a man given to imagination, and no one else saw the rickshaw pass.

You can copy freely from this site. This work is dedicated to the Public Domain.