"Paul Di Filippo - Up Around the Bend" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

Up Around the Bend

by Paul Di Filippo



Story Copyright (C) 2007, Paul Di Filippo.
Images Copyright (C) 2007, Rudy Rucker.
N,NNN Words.




Moving to the country, gonna eat a lot of peaches….
—Presidents of the United States, “Peaches”

Eternal waters away
From the cities of nine
Day’s night whose towers will catch
In the religious wind
Like stalks of tall, dry straw…
—Dylan Thomas,
“Author’s Prologue”

Tomorrow’s just an excuse away.
—The Smashing Pumpkins,
“Thirty-three”




Heading up around the bend, leaving the sinking ship behind, hoping to reach the place where the neons
turn to wood, and the water tastes like wine: a brand-new game, a crystal day:

Afternoon August sunlight splashed the drowsing land. Space and time seemed stunned, slowed.
Cathedrals of wild grape hosted congregations of small twittering birds. Water bearing an intermittent film
of rainbow’d oil and floating paper debris rilled along a small frond-carpeted slough, the litter a factitious
fleet sailing toward some unknown port. A rust-girdered billboard spiked into the earth reared up like a
fragment of some ancient border fortification.

The line of dead and abandoned cars along the road’s green margin afforded slim pickings for stragglers
in the great exodus.

A grease-stained Pendleton blanket in burgundy checks; a transistor radio thick as a brick, whose
weak-batteried reception brought in only static; wind-perused copies of Ramparts, the Oracle, the East
Village Other,Silver Surfer, Make and Wired; a half-empty bottle of Tang; a ripped T-shirt bearing
Hendrix’s portrait, and one advertising Desperate Housewives; a lurid gatefold album missing its vinyl
contents; CDs in cracked jewel cases; a cardboard six-pack of Fanta soda in thick glass bottles; a
BlackBerry with a smashed screen; a fringed leather vest; a Polar Fleece pullover; a torn draft card; a big
Mars bar blazoned 5¢; a snack package of dried green peas rich with Japanese script; an empty can of