Picasso Sunrise

Man, the walls were melting in that slow saxophone drip, and Marlene and Joanie were riding shotgun through the corridors like Route 66 was painted in linoleum tiles, baby. Wheels weren’t chrome, they were rubber on metal — wheelchairs revving in their heads like ‘49 Buicks, headlights beaming in jagged cubes of Picasso sunrise.

“Dig it,” says Marlene, her voice a smoky trumpet, “the speedometer’s in my veins, Jo, and it’s ticking past the midnight limit.” Joanie just grins wide, teeth like tiny white billboards flashing Drink Cola to no one but the passing shadows.

The road was all sharp angles and soft murmurs — a nurse in a paper cap turned into a road sign with a bent arrow pointing Everywhere and Nowhere at once. Plastic water cups clinked like gas station pumps on a lonely desert night.

Out the window — or maybe just the cracked frame of the TV — a Cadillac sky hummed overhead, painted in blocky colors, chunks of blue drifting past cubes of orange. The trees out there weren’t trees, they were green spirals corkscrewing into the horizon like God had a bad case of vertigo.

They leaned into the turns, man, even though the hallway only bent in 90-degree slices. The linoleum shimmered, shifting from cornflower to mustard to midnight black, and they swore they felt the tires squeal on each kaleidoscope mile.

“Next stop, Albuquerque,” Joanie declared, even though the smell of bleach was thick and the hum of the fluorescent lights was the only engine purr in their ears. Marlene nodded, her sunglasses reflecting nothing but the warped face of the clock, hands spinning backward.

And somewhere between the nurses’ station and the laundry cart, they broke free — burst right through the walls into a desert made of triangles and polka dots, and the wind was jazz and the sand was piano keys. And they were driving, baby, driving forever, two wild women burning rubber in the great cubist night.