“Is it really necessary?”

I don’t need a wheelchair yet. After all, I can walk.

I can ignore how every step sends fire through my bones, needles into the ligaments of my kneecaps. I can take a day in bed to recover every time I come across stairs. I can consume ibuprofens like they’re water. I can manage, I can, I can.

“Is it really necessary?”

It’s because I don’t look or act like how they think a wheelchair-user should. I’m young, I have all four limbs. I drink white wine at parties, though I can never stay long, and I love beaches though I haven’t been to one in years. I should be fine, normal, abled, and yet–

“Is it really necessary?”

Give me a toolbox, wrenches, nails. Give me a power drill. I don’t know how to use it but I’ll work it out.

And finally, finally, give me wheels: beautiful, shining spokes which glint in traffic-light reds and yellows, rubber surrounding the rims like a blanket of snow. I love how it feels on my skin. Rough and loving. Organic and not.

“Is it really necessary?”

I looked it up and bicycle spokes more commonly break out of fatigue than from experiencing excessive force.

“Is it really necessary?”

Is it necessary to drink wine? Forbid men to ferment their fruits and see how long it lasts.

Is it necessary to dream? To read? To hold your newborn nephew’s hand, feel his tiny fingers curl around your own? To see the ocean?

“Is it really necessary?”

Axle, meet flesh. I twist the screwdriver until the metal melts through my skin, then fat, the muscle. I go right to the bone, until a little bit of marrow leaks out. I lick my fingers, and they taste of oil.

“Is it really necessary?”

I had a bike when I was a child, but one day I drove it into a ditch and it was irreparably mangled. I grieved for that bike, as if it was a living, breathing creature. As if I knew.

“Is it really necessary?”

The metal burns in my hips, or maybe it’s the fragments of my bone, shattered to pieces by the power drill—which was, to my surprise, quite simple to operate.

My blood boils, flesh sizzles; there is an itch I cannot scratch. My body knows the metal is not meant to be there, but if my body wanted to be left alone it shouldn’t have let me down in the first place.

“Is it really necessary?”

When I first push the wheels along the floor, counting the rotations like heartbeats, I realise I didn’t install any brakes.

“Is it really necessary?”

I want to feel the warm sand between my spokes, I want to go to the corner shop and buy their cheapest bottle of white, I want to visit my nephew.

“Is it really necessary?”

I looked it up and the casing of bicycle tires is sometimes known as a carcass.