In the future, in a rented room over a bar in northern California, George Hill is sleeping badly; so too the woman beside him. She wakes up first. She has a caramel complexion and a spray of freckles over the bridge of her nose, her hair straightened and bleached to a coppery shade only a degree darker than her skin. She's young; scarcely out of ( Read more... )

Goooood morning, Cy-boys and cybergirls!

I'm happy to announce we have a star-crossed winner in today's heartbreak sweepstakes...
--Janelle 'Ruth' Monae, "March of the Wolfmasters"

Time's a crooked bow.
--Andrew 'Idgie' Bird, "Armchairs"
Come with me ( Read more... )

Once upon a time, before they numbered the highways, this was El Camino Real. The Road of the King. Here, not far from the Great Sand Dunes National Park (a nice spot to see, if a little out of the way; if you have a day or two to kill in Colorado before your train, it comes highly recommended) the land begins to get weird. It changes. Mountains ( Read more... )

The truck finally dies south of Pueblo. He'd come to Colorado looking for a friend in Denver, but Josie had moved on a long time ago, and he'd fled south knowing they were on his tail. Now George makes his way down the highway between Colorado City and Walsenburg on foot, his thumb out and his water jug depleted. He wants to believe there will be ( Read more... )

It's an old trick; he got it from his mother, who got it out of a novel. It's a good one, though. It works. It kept them alive, running from the man in the yellow coat, and it kept him alive, getting out of Austin. It'll work with any deck of playing cards, but Tarot cards are better. George used a deck of loteria cards, bought at the HEB the ( Read more... )

( Cut for racially-charged language )

She spends three days in Medicine Bow; one more than she meant to, but on the second day a storm blows through, and she decides that Casper can wait. The winds are bad enough--almost enough to take her off the road on the way into town, despite the weight of the ST1300--and she has no interest in adding the driving rain that pelts the motel windows ( Read more... )

Steinbeck talks about the Badlands in Travels With Charley; he finds them strange and desolate.

Maybe it's just her mood--also strange and a little desolate--but she kind of likes them.

The cabin is called The Tarpaper Shack, but it isn't really. It's a neat and tidy cabin with its own little generator and its own little well and a dusty mile long ( Read more... )

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Rose Toren is fake IDing her way into the Wildrose blockparty... don't tell nobody...
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He's waiting outside her hotel when she gets out of the cab; a small, elderly white man in a shabby blue uniform. Her first thought is doorman, followed by old-time movie theater guy?; telegram is ( Read more... )