The Year of the Stolen Bicycle Tire and Other Stories

By Andrew Kozma

The Year of the Stolen Bicycle Tire and Other Stories is a collection of weird, beautiful literary fiction containing four stories based in the fictional college town of Martinsville, Florida, as well as Athens, Greece, and Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina.

The title story concerns a philosophy professor bent on taking revenge against a bike tire thief, who also happens to be one of his students. In “An Apartment Hunter’s Guide to Martinsville,” a young woman attempts, without luck, to find an apartment and perhaps a friend in her newly-adopted city. “Mile-High Bridge” tells of a couple climbing a mountain to give their cat a wilderness burial, and what they find along the way. Lastly, “The Gypsy” is about a couple in Athens, Greece, just after a city-wide riot, who find a woman who promises to rid them of their bad luck.

Andrew Kozma’s fiction has been published in DIAGRAM, The Cupboard, Fantasy Scroll, and Daily Science Fiction. His book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew Kozma
• Release date: Dec 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311581853

Andrew Kozma

Andrew Kozma’s fiction has been published in Albedo One, Interzone, Fantasy Scroll and Daily Science Fiction. His poems have appeared in Blackbird, Subtropics, Copper Nickel, and Best American Poetry 2015, and his book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award.

Book preview

The Year of the Stolen Bicycle Tire

&Other Stories

By

Andrew Kozma

Table of Contents

The Year of the Stolen Bicycle Tire

An Apartment Hunter’s Guide to Martinsville

Mile-High Bridge

The Gypsy

About the Author

Also by the Author

Credits

Copyright

The Year of the Stolen Bicycle Tire

It is strangely cold, this May night, where Nathan sits behind his student’s car planning reparable damage. He considers a brick through the living room window but fears being caught as lights spring to life down the street. He considers knocking on the front door and, after David pulls the door wide, asking Why? followed by punching David in the face or the stomach, whichever is more accessible. He considers doing simply what he is prepared to do, slash two of the car’s tires, but feels that, though this may be justifiable, it is also less fulfilling. And, still, Nathan does not know, for certain, that it was David who stole his bike tires, on two separate occasions, forcing Nathan to spend money he can’t afford for replacement tires because, unlike his student, he has no car.

There is a party going on in the house. Nathan feels the thumping bass in his chest. The music must be deafening inside. The curtains are tightly drawn, but light glows around the edges with the promise of the forbidden. He hears laughter from the backyard, and the tinny crashing of a screen door.

Nathan stands up awkwardly, using the car for support. He notices a couple against the side of the house moving into each other with a gentle rhythm so he drops back behind the car, his knees grating against gravel. Now that he knows they are there he can hear them, their breathing just above the night sounds, a lone cicada interrupting their drone. He waits for them to leave, watches their feet from under the car.

David’s house is just outside Martinsville’s student ghetto. Though it’s a Saturday, the house is the only one lit up with lights and noise. All the other parties are streets away, which either makes David’s party exclusive or outcast, take your pick.

Nathan picks outcast. And he doesn’t just pick outcast because he thinks David is a lying, vindictive prick; he chooses outcast because David is his student. Or was. The semester is a few days over, and though exams still have to be taken and scored, and final grades established, as far as Nathan is concerned, David is no longer his student, and therefore fair game.

Not that this is a game. Revenge may be a game, but what Nathan will soon be enacting is not revenge but karma, a leveling of the playing field. What Nathan has come to understand in his studying of philosophy and his years of graduate school torture and his years of teaching as a post-doc while searching for a permanent job is that the universe is not a clockwork mechanism where every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Instead, the world is a stew of events randomly stirred together. Chaos, just like the physicists claim. But the physicists overlook the deeper truth that’s already in their body of knowledge: they think the chaos, like the endless patterned digressions of fractals, is order in disguise, if only they had the correct prescription to penetrate it. But Heisenberg had it right—the world is chaos put into order through our actions. Our observation measures the speed and changes the direction, or pinpoints the location but not the speed.

It’s only a small step, Nathan assures us, to move from observation of subatomic elements to overlaying meaning on the visible world. He’s staked his academic career on what his fellow post-docs teasingly call Karmic Philosophy, misunderstanding his theory as one of how the world works rather than a plan for how one