Chrome and Ghosts

The sky was broken glass, violet shards, baby, and Benny was at the wheel, knuckles white bones on the chrome. Milo slouched shotgun, shades crooked, a cigarette not lit but glowing anyhow in his mind’s eye, puff puff on the dream smoke of another gone America.

The world had fallen, crumbled, jackstraw ruins of cities behind them, towers bent like tired reeds, neon blinking NO in every direction. The car — a busted Ford that thought it was a Cadillac — coughed jazz from its tailpipe, coughing, laughing, roaring down the blacktop like the devil had sketched it with a ruler and a bent hand.

“Keep it steady, man, the desert’s alive,” Milo muttered, watching the dunes shift like cubist paintings rearranging themselves, triangles of gold sliding into purple, horizons folding back on themselves like origami maps. “The sand’s a goddamn sax solo, and it’ll eat us whole if we don’t listen to the rhythm.”

Benny grinned, teeth like streetlights half-burned out. “We’re out, man, we’re out. No more jackboot blues, no more sirens screaming bedtime. Just asphalt arteries leading us to the big nothing.” His words bounced around the dashboard, ricochets in the glass.

The car hummed into forever, tires chewing lines that weren’t lines, just zigzags painted by some mad cubist saint. Every cactus was a green exclamation point, every buzzard a black comma punctuating the silence.

Behind them: ruins, madness, the weight of the fallen world, cities choked in dust and broken promises. Ahead of them: the wide-open, a crooked road made of jazz and heat, painted in blocks of color so wild they could taste them — red like iron in the mouth, yellow like whiskey in the throat.

And the motor sang — oh it sang — a beatnik hymn to escape, to freedom, to two men hurtling in their rolling coffin of chrome and ghosts, fleeing the collapse, chasing the horizon, forever, forever, forever.