Born Under Beer: An Excerpt

For a creative writing class at the U of W I wrote a short story that was conceived when nostalgia got drunk and seduced a parallel universe. This is an excerpt from that story...

7:13 AM

The fire was no longer crackling.  The sun was beginning to scatter a bright, kaleidoscopic orange across the snowy trees.  Owen’s mind was wrapped in a wet sock.  It rolled lazily behind curtains constructed from winter fleece and glasses of beer.  Yet, just as the sun remembers the landscape which it abandons to darkness, Owen recalled the events of the prior night.  He lurched off the sofa, looked out the window and, upon discovering the driveway void of any Jeep or any friends, dashed to the door and spewed vomit onto the alabastrine snow.  Before he had recovered from the vile discharge, Owen was putting on his boots and starting down the winding block road in search of the lost boys.

He moved as quickly as his tormented and tired body could, trotting down long stretches of icy road and labouring up hill after icy hill.  He moved like syrup over the cold highway, every stuttering step drawing him towards the Knotty Girl motor hotel.  It might have been 15 kilometres from the cabin, but it was the only place that sold alcohol out here.  Owen prayed to Jesus and Buddha that he would find his friends there. 

However, before he had slipped halfway to the unlikely asylum, Owen was diverted from his course by a foreboding beacon.  Through rum-soaked eyes he spied a single, deep tire rut that ran for fifteen feet alongside a branching road.  The detour had no sensible explanation, yet, obeying a “hangover hunch,” Owen turned down the road.  He was unfamiliar with the area, but was sure that this new path was cutting back behind the cabins and funneling down towards the lake. 

After weaving through the sparkling woods, the thin road blossomed into a large, open expanse.  Owen was blinded.  When his eyes adjusted to the unexpected blaze he saw that he was standing at the crest of an inoperative boat-launch.  He could see the tracks clearly now.  His mind paralyzed, he drifted down the gentle slope until he was standing, once more, on the vast, frozen lake.  Looking out, he could see the tire marks going and going and going and going.  Then, with the ambition of astral pioneers, they shot through the heart of the rising sun and were gone forever.