The Girl In The Motorcycle Painting

Juliette-Motorcycle-Ptg-Blur

Nestled behind the gallery was a long, narrow room which could only be accessed through a phantom painting hanging on the back wall, a room where space jockeys once lingered between interstellar flights and romantic dalliances. Now it was Chrome’s inner sanctum. At the far end of the dimly lit chamber, light pods lingered over the imposing figure of a Hell’s Angel exploding across a canvas as if he were storming the pearly gates on a bolt of chrome lightning.
“Wow. Looks like you in a previous life. Is it?” She was staring wide-eyed at the painting.
“I might be the glimmer in his eyes… I think we come from the same family tree.”
“How’s that?” she asked cautiously.
“Will Powers, the mind on the other side, the one who created us, was swept into a big city by this painting many years ago, leading to his own wild journey to the edge of existence and beyond, to a new kind of creative redemption. I think it’s really him in the painting, born and raised in hell and running flat out for the gates of heaven. He didn’t quite make it; but man, what a ride. He could’ve given Icarus a run for his money.”
Juliette, wild child of imagination that she was, had already left the building on the back of that dream machine while Chrome rambled on unawares. She found herself cruising through mindspace with the Angel, inexorably drawn toward the sound of an old delta blues tune, a beacon set in place by the creator himself, that she might bear witness to the days and nights he spent marooned on an island called Manhattan, in the Year of our Lord, One Thousand Nine Hundred and Sixty Nine…

– An excerpt from my new novel, Wild Child