Neon Oasis
My thumb had been stuck out for what felt like forever, as the sun etched future furrows into my virgin neck, unused to life out West, and sweathead had turned my coif into string theories. Just as I was about to give up and concede defeat to the endless highway, a beat-up, filthy, yellow El Camino from the 1970s sputtered to a stop on the shoulder.
The driver, a woman with fiery red hair and a face creased with laugh lines, rolled down the window. “Need a lift?” she asked, her voice raspy.
Relief flooded through me. “Hell yeah,” I croaked, my voice thick from disuse. “…and I can spell it too!”
I climbed into the passenger seat, wincing as the hot black seat cover seared my bare milky skin. The truck smelled of cigarettes, ice cream, figurines of the Virgin Mary, as well as something sweet, maybe burnt caramel. The woman, introducing herself as Maggie, didn’t waste time on small talk. She threw the pickup car into scatgear and we wuz off, our rockers, and bouncing bouncing down the highway like a heart upon an anvil.
For a while, alls one could see was the endless expanse of dusty road, the scrubby desert landscape blurring by in a brown and green smear. Then, as we crested a hill, the scene before me took the breath away. The breath, she went away. Gone. Gone like the wind that breathes us.
Sprawled out in the valley below was a city. Not just any city. This city pulsed with light, a luminous neon oasis in the middle of nothing, nowhere. Towers of chrome and glass pierced the sky, their surfaces reflecting the light from a thousand signs in a kaleidoscope of colors.
A wide river snaked through the city center, its surface slick with the sheen of reflectoneonicotae, or subtle neon, something like that. On the far bank, I could just make out the silhouette of a massive castle, its spires clawing at the belly of a full moon that hung heavy in the velvet sky.
A sound, a low thrumming that vibrated through the very ground, began to make itself heard. As we got closer, it morphed into a symphony of sound – car horns, music that thumped and pulsed, the indistinct roar of a crowd.
“Welcome to Nova,” Maggie said, a sly grin spreading across her face.
I swallowed hard. This wasn’t what I’d been expecting. I’d been picturing a quiet, maybe even quaint, little town. This… this was something different entirely. A knot of apprehension tightened in my stomach.
“What is this place?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper.
Maggie’s grin widened. “This, kid,” she said, her eyes gleaming with a dangerous light, “is where dreams come true.”
Nova wasn’t what I’d been expecting, but there was no turning back now. I was here, and something deep inside me, a primal curiosity I couldn’t deny, thrummed with anticipation. Maybe, just maybe, this city held something for me after all.