Free Onion Songs by Steve Rasnic Tem Page B

son...”
    “ ...will someday all be mine,” Mark interjected.
    Lucas painted an elaborate image of the mansion they would someday build using the floor as base. A wide portico all around, several entranceways, an im mense expanse of glass, and several vistas of awe-inspiring aspect. Lucas counted some of these off on his fingertips: the curtain of gigantic pine, the plateau gauzed in grays and purples, the broad grassy slope flowered yellow, red, and blue, and... what was this?
    Mark had run past the tall marble columns, the coved ceilings, the exotic tapestries of the home place, and was climbing the fan-like marble staircase of this last unexpected vista, The Swedish Memorial Hospital.
    Lucas stared slack-jawed at the ruin. The Swedish Memorial Hospital was a five-level complex, each level built on the ruins of the former. Castle turrets meshed with steel framing and glass walls, stucco and wood. The several hundred yards of skylight had been shattered. Six brightly painted hot air balloons and two large dirigibles hung torn and abandoned from spires and eaves. Vines and weeds crept up between cracks and holes in the concrete. He could just make out the scarlet thread remnants of the banners. On the plain behind the hospital he could see the ashen wrecks of dozens of flying fortresses, once used to transport the wounded from all parts of the globe.
    Mark was halfway up the stairs when Lucas snapped out of his reverie, panicked, and raced screaming after him.
    But too late... the Rifleman could see already that he would fail. Already the young men in their red pageboy costumes were trumpeting at the top of the staircase. Already spiders, lizards, and snails were creeping out of the ruined masonry. Somewhere bands were playing, women dancing in their fine robes, great stallions pawing the pebbles atop the stone walls. Already The Pilot, that career intruder, was standing haughtily next to his gigantic saddled alligator, whistling, and cheering Mark on to the top of his stairs, into The Pilot’s waiting arms.
    And already The Rifleman knew his son would soon leave North Carolina, would never till the family lands, own the cancerous cow, or build the family mansion of many vistas on the primeval hardwood floor.
    The Rifleman, formerly known as Lucas McCane, collapsed at the Swedish Memorial Hospital staircase, and wept bitterly over this failure of his imagination.

 
    JUNGLE J.D.
     
    You can keep on mockin ’, but I can’t stop rockin’...
    Tony couldn ’t believe his luck. Here he had himself a bad girl. Joy, the baddest girl he’d ever known, and not only was she with him, but she was with him in a stolen Chevy making it ninety miles an hour cross-country on Route 66, and how’s that for some kind of rock ’n’ roll legendary-type road trip? Halfway between Las Vegas, New Mexico and Santa Fe now, give or take a few tumbleweeds. The sky wide open for dreams. It was like some kind of goddamned movie! The gang was going to shit, if he ever saw the gang again. Maybe he’d send them a picture postcard, with one of them hotdog stands shaped just like a coney on it, send it to Carson’s Drugstore so they all could read it. Cool, man.
    “ Long as nobody got hurt.” That’s what his grandma woulda told him. Long as nobody got hurt—like that was the answer for everything. And maybe it was. But sometimes the answers run out, Grandma, and people, well you know people do get hurt. And deep down, Tony knew he much preferred it be the other guy what got hurt.
    Tony turned his head once again to moon over Joy, and he was so excited, and it felt like maybe his head went a little too far, and he liked the feeling, so then it was like his head was spinning around like a record, but unevenly, so that every song played had a roughness to it, his head playing some angry song like Link Wray ’s “Rumble” over and over again. He could still see Joy through his dizziness: sitting all pretty in her yellow Capri pants and pink