Free Punktown: Shades of Grey by Jeffrey Thomas, Thomas Scott Page A

though still quite popular with those who had grown up with him, but he’d half-remembered a song he’d heard his father play, and he was listening to it now for the third time in a row.
    Kahn sang the song in a subdued, deep voice. The barren instrumentation consisted of little more than a beat like a melancholy stroll, and almost church-like organ music that several times in the song lifted with a kind of false hope before falling short of its pinnacle and returning to a morose undercurrent. The song was called Green Bird .
     
    “Your pet bird was small and green
    And when he died, we walked on down
    To a graveyard, large and gray
    On the furthest edge of town.
     
    We walked and walked, sad and slow
    Til we found a name that fit
    A gravestone for a man named ‘Green’
    We felt that was appropriate.
     
    I watched as you knelt and dug
    A little hole, to make his bed
    I thought , I hope I’m that loved
    When it’s my turn to be dead.
     
    By the winter, you had gone
    Something happened, something died
    I wondered what I could have done
    To make you want to leave my side.
     
    I walk this graveyard path alone
    Looking for a name that fits
    For a man who’s a lost fool
    For a man who’s broke to bits.
     
    I find a gravestone, carved with ‘Green’
    I kneel and scoop some dirt in hand
    Let it trickle to the ground
    Our love is buried where I stand.”
     
    As the organ music trailed off, Karlos swiped a tear from his cheek. He didn’t know exactly what part of the song he might want to quote to Aundrea to express his pain…perhaps he wanted to recite it to her in its entirety.
    He played it again from the beginning, memorizing the words.
     
    ««—»»
     
    Josh’s hovercar rested in the driveway of his parents’ condominium in Woods Court on the outskirts of Punktown, where the cosmetic and widely spaced trees that lined the micro-neighborhood’s streets hardly lived up to the moniker. Aundrea was poised at the passenger’s door, her hand on its latch, waiting for Josh to enter his vehicle and unlock her side. As she stood waiting, she saw a reflection in the window of a figure moving up behind her and turned toward it sharply, letting go of the door.
    “Please hear my words, they’re the only gift I bring,” Karlos told her, spreading his hands out from his sides, his eyes pained, “the message of my meaning is in the rhymes I sing.”
    “Dung, crap and shit!” Aundrea cried out, as Gala Dali did at the start of her song Flush You . It was a currently popular expression of surprise or dismay, or both.
    Josh looked up across the bonnet of his car and saw his rival there. It was as though a lightning bolt pierced him through the crown, pinning him to the street as his every nerve was flooded with its charge. He knew Karlos’s temper. Even though he’d known he was taking this risk all along, he hadn’t faced the possibility head on…had hoped Aundrea would split from Karlos before such a confrontation could occur. His first impulse was to run back to his condo’s door, but if Karlos had a gun he could pick him off easily. And hadn’t Karlos asked him not long ago for the number of the black market dealer he had bought some of his more exotic swords from? That dealer, whom he never would have dealt with himself had he known that he was one of those scary Coleopteroids, no doubt had plenty of frightening firearms to sell. And he remembered it was a gun that Karlos had expressed interest in buying…
    He ducked lower behind his car and finished unlocking its door, while Aundrea kept Karlos occupied. He could hear her shouting again as she backed away from her approaching boyfriend.
    “Stop stalking me, fucker, I’ll call the force down here,” she yelled, scrambling backward around the tail of the hovercar, to where Josh was. Josh would protect her from whatever her volcanic boyfriend might do. “You aren’t some mighty hunter to hunt your little deer!”
    Karlos was upset that Aundrea would