43: Comanche

This place wasn't always a diner, it was built for something narrow and urgent. The joint is full of moes trying to smother tonight's drunk under eggs and grits and flesh and fat.

There's only one waitress and she is custom built. Pushing fifty with a face that's still waiting for pretty. Straight back, bony hands, calves like a goatfucker. A name tag that reads "Daisy". No shit.

She hasn't stopped moving. Not in an hour and a half. Maybe more. She jerks along efficiently up and down that corridor with the lunging lushes. The floor is coated with grease and spit. Plates piled high with oozing, sliding sick make it from window to table without loosing a molecule. She's good.

There must be miles beneath her soles already, with miles still to come. This table, then the next, then the next, then the next, then the next, then the counter, the whole lenght of it. Endlessly. The show's a bit too ungainly to be mesmerizing. Fascinating though . An hour and a half already. At least.

"Ready to go yet?" asks Kadrey.
"No," says Evan, "not until something breaks."

44: Videotape

There's a clean line taunting us, pornographic contact of earth and sky. There is nothing to it, it's just a game of knees and elbows. Up, up, up always up, any other motion is a deception, a feint to come back to up, up, and up. Our signatures are stamped in the dirt, once, twice, thrice a second. We're both Neil Armstrong today and maybe even tomorrow, and maybe even the whole week. As long as it takes for the wind and the lizards and the armadillos to erase us, to forget us.

There is immense silence between the moments where our feet slam into the dirt. We are supersonic jets, constantly booming once, twice, thrice a second. Behind us, an invisible wake, and ghosts made of dust and speed, ephemeral like songs on Mars. We are a Buzz Aldrin dream: ships made of energy. We consume what we are to make distance irrelevant. We exhale and sweat the particles that kissed our mothers and held our brothers. We keep going until there is nothing left but the going.