Postcards to Samantha
Cycling in West Edmonton Mall Waterpark
A bicycle is borrowed and an inter-dimensional incident occurs
Preamble
A lifetime ago I had a postal romance with a woman who was working in a foreign country. By postal romance, I mean I sent her postcards filled with outrageous lies and she would occasionally politely acknowledge them in response.
She rather sensibly ended up having an actual in-person romance with someone else and the postcards petered out. I no longer have any of this correspondence but I recently found some notes about what I sent at the time so I thought I would try to recreate them. This is the first of these. It is part of an ongoing series.
1 March 1992
Edmonton, Alberta
Dear Samantha,
Thanks for letting me use your bike while you are in Nigeria. Unfortunately, I had a small incident with it. I promise I’ll get it fixed once I figure it out. It’s a little weird.
I rode the bike to the mall, but I couldn’t see anywhere to safely lock it up. Someone was just coming out of one of the doors, so I kept going and rode through the entrance.
It turns out you’re not supposed to ride bikes inside the mall. A couple of security…