Strider-kun...,

Make me dust. You should have seen my calves. I could climb anything. Mountains that went straight up for a hundred miles. Walter and I reached the top and planted flags with our initials sewn on. I could sew then too. Those are probably still there but no one’s seen them but us. We went up together when we were twenty-six and then again when we were thirty-one and they were still there. His was red and mine was blue and they were both still there and they were the only ones there when we went back. I wasn’t tired at the top and neither was he.
Once we climbed all the way to the top and skied down. The trip was supposed to take four days but it took the two of us sixteen hours and we packed only two meals each a canteen and ski supplies. We screamed together at the top to down below but I know nobody heard us. It was a very high mountain but we weren’t cold. We strapped the skies to our boots and raced down. I won but it was close.
Then I rode across Africa because I was tired of snow. The day was dry. I was twenty-seven. I was married then and she was beautiful and much younger than me. Sometime before that I took her to her prom and neither of us liked The Beatles very much and people looked at us funny because I wore a mustache in those days and have always looked old. But we still danced. Her parents were some type of religious and I had long hair then and they didn’t like me. They told me it’d send me to hell. She took her own life when she was thirty-one. I thought we were okay. She put herself in front of a train and damn near stopped the thing.
I was on my bike and I saw a lion. It had an arm in its teeth. A local fisherman told us when we left our destination that it was possible we would see a lion but that usually they stayed away or you didn’t see one at all. He’d never heard of people biking across Africa before and he fed us drinks all night and treated us like kings. They tasted bitter but we drank a lot because we knew how long and hot the ride would be. And because that sort of thing is polite and you should always do it. The ride took a year. I never felt sick once the whole ride but that night Walter and I each drank one hundred beers and we were both pretty sick.
There was a lot of blood and the lion started chasing after us and I was ahead of Walter and I turned around and saw the lion right on his tail and shouted at him to pedal faster if he didn’t want to be cat food and I didn’t think he had it in him but I never should have doubted Walter and soon he was passed me and the lion was on my tail so I kicked it into gear and Walter and I rode side-by-side much faster than the silly lion. We were lucky the wind was at our back and we rode this way for an hour. I turned around and the lion was so far away but when I was young I could see miles and way back so far away that even if he roared we wouldn’t hear it let alone be afraid I saw the lion and he was catching his breath.
It started in my throat. This was last year today. I felt like I’d swallowed a gumball. When I was seven I won a gumball at a fair game and swallowed it whole on the car ride home and didn’t tell my mother. I was in the backseat and she couldn’t even tell I swallowed my whole gumball. It hurt but I didn’t show it. It felt like that. Then I fell down on my hip and my calves tightened up and my legs started to shake. I grabbed my calves with my hands and tried to hold them still but they wouldn’t stop moving and then my hands started to shake too. You should see my calves. I’m in a chair now but you should see them next to a photo of when you really should have seen them. Now they can’t do anything. They just sit there all pretty. The muscles’ still on them. The rest of me hasn’t stopped shaking in a year but I’m going to and that’s that. Put the photo of Walter and Mary and I drunk in Venezuela with that fishing boat captain in the chest pocket of my navy blues. It’s on the mantle in the living room and the blues are in my top drawer. Walter and I went back and killed that lion too. I have her jaw. Put that in there too if you can find it but I don’t remember where it is.