Oh, That Modern Style!

Our Tires Redeem the Asphalt Glories of Creation

A lyrical story in the modern style
by Ran Screaming.

CHAPTER MMMMCMXCV

He'd know'd it'd be hard for him to hide the drugs he'd haggled over in Tucson in the hotel highlands of Vanishing Point, but he'd kept his eyes on the road, his hands gripping the wheel, his foot tapping and bouncing and hovering and aching near that clutch thing down there by the vinyl floor covering he'd picked up in Wormley, where it'd been a sale item, a steal, at 95 cents, yeah, keep the change, how 'bout that weather, huh, not like useta be.

"Thar's a Buick."

"Nope."

"Is too."

"Nope."

Matty'd always be hampering his style. She'd be sitting beside him, guzzling Cokes, fumbling with the silver talisman of her jacket zipper, crushing mayflies between her teeth, casting aspersions on his naked dreams and glories.

"You sure that ain't a Buick?"

"Yep."

He'd picked her up in a bar near Wattahollowstump, where she'd be'd singing a torch song, tossing her feet along with the honky-tonk stomping rhythms, bellowing each couplet like a monsoon in apple season.

"It had that kinda Buick roof, ya know?"

"Nope."

Was there any point to life, he'd asked. Was there any. Her song'd touched him, but not in a good way, not in a way that'd have met with parental approval. He'd see'd right through her, right in that first primeval moment, that trilobitic caesura of cigarette clarity.

"Any more Cokes?"

"Nope."

"Fine. I'll just keep watchin' them Buicks."

THE CRITICS RAVE!

"Ran Screaming is the lyrical genius of our geological epoch."

"His sentences gloat and chortle, pounce and retreat, sigh and bellow, wobble and sparkle."

"No one can match his clarity of vision, his precision, his concision, his incisions into the heart of literary ambience."

"I have heard the future of the approaching, imminent American literary renaissance, and it sounds like Screaming."