Sorry for the long wait on my writing. I've been really busy with a lot of things, and I've been doing a fair amount of writing for school. This is one of those writings, a short story for a creative writing class. It's not as happy as most of the things I like to write, I'm afraid, and i didn't intend it to be a story containing anthro characters.
I'd like to warn the reader now that this story contains heavy subject matter and reader discretion is advised.
This is also the unedited version, so please, PLEASE tell me about any syntax errors, or any problems with understanding the story; writing about two unnamed male characters makes for tricky use of pronouns. I'm very appreciative. -Den


On Motorcycles and the House of the Rising Sun

Life is a sea. The universe is an ocean. A life is but a teardrop in that ocean.
The engine snarled, the sound reflecting through the air as it ricocheted off the hard pavement and the gravel shoulder.
Life is a raindrop; falling from the sky until it hits the ground, shattering and running off to become a part of something else, something new.
Engine sound flooded the empty fields, saturating the late morning air with the deep thunder of its cylinders.
Life is painful. Life is worthwhile. Life is a sea set to storm, set to calm, set to rain and winds and bright day and starry night. Life is satire and joy and consequence and irrelevance.
The pounding bass crescendo met its apex, falling slowly in a decrescendo of intention. The fields became soundless, calm.
Life, like silence, is a fermata. Despite being held for as long as is possible, it ultimately meets a cessation.
The clutch slipped. The bike screamed, its acceleration threatening to pitch him backward as he hammered the blaring engine with throttle. Waves migrated across colorless alfalfa fields as the wind pushed its fingers through his pale sterling hair. He watched the harvested corn fields on his flanks as they blurred into a golden indistinctness to the horizon, their rows melding into quickly passed illusions of infinite aisles and unfilled corridors. The road stretched out before him, narrow, reaching to the sky dominating the rural countryside.
A flexion of the clutch, and the bike reached its highest gear. Shielded from the wind behind goggles, indifferent eyes wandered to the speedometer perched atop the headlight of his fairingless cycle. The needle held at sixty. Much faster than this on a back road was suicide.
He twisted the throttle back farther.
Imperfections, grey and white streaks of stones and scrapes and holes and ice-wedging fissures, hardly distinguishable on the road fore, raced beneath his feet and the bike’s undercarriage as it accelerated faster still, climbing past seventy, then eighty. A carefree grin spread across his lips in the face of freedom and speed: detachment from memories and alleviation of emotional affliction.
The gilded, dead remains of corn stalks disappeared behind him, green fields of wild grasses, still visibly moist with morning dew, and horse paddocks composing a newer, more vibrant companionship. Under the bike’s tires, dirt crunched, small stones were kicked from the road, catching the frame with mellow pings over the thrum of the engine and wind noise. Rusting green oil pump jacks marked the horizon, bobbing up and down in their merry, unceasing manner, the fields scarred by their untended gravel and dirt access roads.
Trees began making shy appearances, pines and ash and birch, growing in number with his impetus to the base of the approaching hill. With the road free of soil and its surface less worn than that behind him, he accelerated, shooting up the rise with barely a dissension of the charger below him.
The crest broke, and he was surrounded by the green leaves and tawny underbrush of the forest. The road, virgin asphalt, with crisp, cleanly painted yellow lines and barely a wear mark from motorcars and trucks to pit its surface, stretched straight for miles through hills and trees.
He closed his eyes. The wind tousled his unbound hair, the hand of an intangible paramour stroking an unreleased inamorato. There was nothing but the blinking of daylight and tree-line shadows on his eyelids to tell him he was still alive.
Surrendered to the world of the metaphysical, his eyes remained closed.
He could pretend he was free.
He could be free.

The final red and black gas canister bounced to the untended lawn with a mellow thud, catching another depleted plastic container from the pile that had accumulated adjacent to the front porch. He turned to the awaiting bed of his aged and salt-rusted white pickup, parked for the last time where it stood in the crumbling concrete of the garage driveway, and stopped. He raised his violently shaking hands before his face, scrutinizing them, before reaching into the pocket of his jeans and producing a prescription pill bottle, unscrewing the cap and pouring out a palmful of white pills. He waited for the tremors to stop.
Eyes, yellowed with jaundice, watched from an unblinking gaze as figures drew like black smoke spires from the uncut turf, twisting maliciously into upright shapes and solidifying. His mate, he who the world had labeled as a paramour, rose, silent, appearing as he had looked as an adolescent, before they had met. In his hallucination, others appeared too. Like children, they sang and chanted abuse in innocent voices.
The ghosts of friends and family past danced in a ring around him, leaping and pirouetting, their dissents and jeers rising from the overgrown grass and sparsely planted maples. His mate stood there, erect, staring at the decaying house amid the hostile ballet like the ferry-man Charon observing the gates of hell.
Amid the wild Styx and facing blazing hell-fires, he had held to his hopeful optimism; never letting a small smile or a gleaming look vacate his face for long, holding out a hazel fire of life in his eyes even as the pitch and tar-blackened sea engulfed and crushed him. But here, a seed was sown that would one day see his life reaped.
The breeze shifted, traveling through the open portrait windows, the harsh fumes of gasoline drowning out musty smells of mothballs and stagnancy in the empty house, and dissolving the damned late and children. Numb, he turned away from the place the illusions had stood. If pain was all he could feel in life, then he would rather feel nothing at all. The Vicodan worked admirably in that way. The pills had taken his pain, and with it, his mind. Left to its course, they would have his life as well.
He smiled evilly in satire to himself. Because of this house and the corpses who had mislabeled it as a home, he’d had to bury his love, and with him, his heart. But he would require no such service; he would cremate himself, and with him, the house from which all his worldly hate had spawned.
He uncapped an expensive glass vodka bottle - only the best for such an occasion as this - and tossed the cap to the ground. The glass cool on his feverish lips, he tipped back the bottle, tasting the alcohol, but being incapable of feeling the burn on his throat as it made its way down. He pulled a rag - the remains of a white shirt - from the truck bed, pressing it to the bottle’s opening and tipping it up and down as he walked to the house’s propped door, soaking it with Russia’s finest.
An island of stone in a pond of dark carpeting, he had chosen the hearth for this final exercise in futility. Futile, because an act of revenge - an act of self destruction - against those long buried could achieve no purpose. But then, life had achieved him no purpose, either, save for what had already been lost.
Flicking off his sandals and feeling the coolness of the hard masonry under the balls of his feet, he set his bottle, the alcohol-moistened shirt stuffed solidly into its mouth, at his feet. The white cap of the golden pill bottle clattered to the brickwork. Raising the opiates to his upturned mouth, he tipped back the small bottle, choking as he struggled to swallow in entirety the freshly-filled prescription, leaning back against the stone-black propane fireplace. The plastic bottle, and with it a number of errant pills, fell to the floor.
Wiping thick spittle from his lips with his forearm, he drew a wooden match, striking its burgundy head to life against the box it came from. He brought the glass bottle to shoulder height, its clear liquid contents sloshing with his motion. A touch of the alight match and its wick flashed to flagration.
He blew out the match, its smoke tendrils rising and becoming acrid in his nose. Opening his mouth, he pressed the spent match, still a glowing ember, to his tongue, unfeeling as its remaining heat was extinguished with a loud hiss. The dead match landed on the gasoline dampened carpet. Feeling the wave of Vicodin taking effect, he raised the flaming bottle, assuring that it hovered above the stone hearth.
He blinked.
His mate stood before him, his beautiful, deep mahogany and mossy green speckled eyes now a thick, cloudy white and his healthy, tanned skin pallid save for where his life-blood had dried to a gory ruddy black; just as he had been found after he had taken that last ride, a death ride, and the coroner had dissected his body from the corpse of the cycle and laid him on a stainless autopsy table to be identified. He was crying, holding out his arms in bequeathment for his lover’s life.
His eyes, dilating into colorless, black orbs set against golden sclera under his final high, lost sight, the appointments of the room blurring from concreteness to an abstraction of lights and darks. But his mate remained; distinct, pleading with his every gesture.
“No, that wasn’t right. . .” he thought to himself, closing his sightless eyes and conjuring again in his mind the healthy, loving, and tender mate that he had spent his best days with in a time that no antagonist or evil could touch now.
His brain, crashing under the curtain-fall overdose, flashed long held and jealously guarded memories. Again, and for the last time, he and his mate held hands, walking downtown on a late autumn evening. They shared a tender moment as, from a tent in a wood-clearing, they looked, awed, to the stars above. Faced with a painful reality, he dug his crying face into a warm, loving shoulder. Naïve and full of hope, he waved and said good bye. . . .
The bottle fell from his hand.