The Insect Behind My Eye

 The lost boy gripped the handle bars of his bike. His objective was to get home and he could feel an adrenaline rush throughout his body. His eyes were shiny and with a smile, he pumped his legs up and down to generate speed on his mountain bike. 
            It was three in the morning that he left work and as he turned off the highway he thought how wonderful it was now that he wouldn’t have to stare at the bright headlights of incoming cars. It would be country roads all the way to his house. He shook the anxiety of being hit by a car and biked faster down the country road. He thought of himself as the Midnight Biker because he biked at night and it made him feel like a gunslinger.
            He felt the wind hit his face and wiped the sweat from his cheeks. Suddenly, something flew in his ear and he lost control. The kid fell off his bike and collapsed onto the pavement. He looked around, realizing he was in the middle of the road and felt pain in his knee as well as something moving in his ear canal. He could hear chewing and the fluttering that sounded like wings. It was trying to move even further down his ear canal and it hurt.  
            There was a light at the end of the dark tunnel for the gunslinger. He walked to a well-lit house that was about a hundred feet away, across the street. The fluttering and chewing continued and he thought it was going to reach his brain.
            The biker knocked at the door, but nobody answered.  He became impatient and scared as he knocked again, but harder.  
            “Come on,” he cried.
             
            Suddenly, he saw the door bell, and hit it. He waited until two people came to the door and they looked at him apprehensively. One was a man wearing his pajamas and held a handgun.  His wife was behind him in her nightgown and they huddled behind the door.
 
             “Can we help you?” asked the man. 
            The Midnight Biker cried, “there’s something in my ear and I want to know if you can see it?”
            He could see the man was determined not just to protect his house and
wife, but also to kill anyone who bothered him late at night to look in someone’s ear.
 
             “I don’t see anything,” answered the man.
             “I’m not putting on a show, and have no interest in robbing you.  I have something in my ear!”
            Slowly the man came out from his door to get a better look at the biker.  He looked confused at him and thought he was insane. He cocked his gun as though he was expecting anything.
             
            “No I don’t see anything,” he answered.
 
            The gunslinger felt anguish because there was no way to show what was in his ear. He wished he had some way to prove it, but even he didn’t know what was in his ear. It probably was a small bat and it was trying to squeeze into his ear to create a nest. That’s all the lost boy needed,  a bat making a home in his brain.
 
            “Where do you live?” asked the man.
            The young man cried in pain as he pointed to the road, “I just live up the road from here!”
           
            The pain and fluttering of the insect living in his ear hurt. The lost boy could not determine what it was like to experience the pain with any other specific feeling.  He gathered what strength he had to get home.
 
            “Will you be all right?” asked the man. 
            The lost boy let out a sigh as he touched his right ear with agony and lied, “I’ll be fine.” 
           
            As he left, he knew he made himself look like an ass by going to a stranger’s house complaining that something was in his ear when they couldn’t see what was in his ear in the first place. 
            He could not bike the same as he did before the incident.  He was unbalanced for what seemed like an eternity of madness.
           
            When he got home, he cried, “mother, mother, I have something in my ear!”
 
            His mother woke up to see what her son was screaming about. It was five in the morning and she was half asleep. Her warm tenderness calmed him down and tried to figure out what was wrong.
            “I don’t see anything, try using the water in the faucet or Q-Tips,” she suggested.  

To be continued. . . . 

Available on The Legacy Anthology, Blue Dragon Fantasy; Faded Memories and Short Stories" and on Kindle. 

"The Insect Behind My Eye" 

Red and Blue Dragon Fantasy LLC. 

Ryan Keith Johnson 

Copy Right 2012, 2015

All Rights Reserved.