Was filling up the car at a gas station when I noticed a bicycle chained to a signpost at the corner. Well, part of a bicycle…

Chained Bike Skeleton

As you see, this bike has been there for a long time (enough to develop serious rust), and in the meantime it lost wheels, seat, handlebars and more. Only a bare skeleton remained, as if the bike had been dropped into a river of mechanical Piranhas.

So what? So it suddenly reminded me of the image of a human skeleton chained to a wall, a literary device used all too often in the pulp horror fiction of my childhood, in more recent action movies, and even in some respectable literature. The poor bike had lost all its removable organs, but the predators that did this never bothered to unchain it from the signpost…