Walter lived alone so he could answer to no one. Even God, he said, could wait.
In July of his fiftieth year he bought a large, red motorcycle and paid for private lessons to learn to ride. He kept the chrome gleaming, the paint shining, the leather clean. During his summer vacation from teaching, he rode one day and removed dirt, dust, and grime the next. He waxed his helmet, the only red clothing he owned.
A lean man, he started his day at dawn and bedded himself at nine p.m. after laying out clean clothes for the next day. All his pride rose from a devotion to order.
On the first day of school, Walter parked his motorcycle in his reserved space. At six o’clock the faculty lot stood vacant, save for his shiny red machine. In his information packet for the new year, he discovered that he had been assigned a new parking space, a resignation and a retirement bringing him two places closer to the entrance. He stepped crisply down two flights of stairs to move the machine so as to be properly parked.
Seeing no need to start the motor, he raised the kick stand and guided the machine across two empty spaces. Walking on the downhill side of the slightly slanting lot, he misjudged the motorcycle’s weight. He struggled to stay upright, staggered a few feet, then toppled onto the blacktop. The machine fell on him, breaking his hip.
Walter spent weeks in the hospital, came home on crutches, and reluctantly hired a housekeeper. He waited until the spring motorcycle season, sold his machine, and died without finishing out the school year.
Merle Drown is the author of stories, essays, plays, reviews, and two novels, Plowing Up A Snake (The Dial Press) and The Suburbs Of Heaven (Soho Press, 2000), trade paperback (Berkley Press, 2001). He edited Meteor in the Madhouse, the posthumous novellas of Leon Forrest, published by Northwestern University Press in 2001. Barnes and Noble chose The Suburbs of Heaven for its Discover Great New Writers series. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the NH Arts Council and teaches in Southern NH U's MFA program. Pieces from his collection-in-progress, Shrunken Heads, miniature portraits of the famous among us, or Balzac in a Nutshell, have (or will) appeared in Amoskeag, Meetinghouse, Night Train, The Kenyon Review, Rumble, Sub-Lit, Word Riot, Bound Off, JMSS, Eclectica and 971 Menu.