Starburst rainbow's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Starburst Rainbow crouched behind a dusty sedan in the casino lot and counted the neon bulbs on the sign above him. Inside that building sat the caravan queen he meant to marry, a woman who believed every story he'd ever fed her about their shared past. She thought they'd danced at Woodstock. She thought he'd pulled her from a river in 1972. He had done none of it. But her rings were real gold, and her caravan stretched half a mile, and tonight he planned to propose. The problem stood forty feet away, sandals planted in the gravel, waiting on him with a patient smile. Butterfly Moonbeam was his current girlfriend, and she had been his current girlfriend for eleven years. She wore the same tie-dye dress she'd worn the day they met. Her grey hair fell around a braided headband. She squinted through round glasses at a folded map she couldn't read, humming. She thought he was inside the gas station getting directions. She always thought that. Every time they got lost in this same stretch of desert, he vanished for hours, and she waited, and she never asked a single hard question. He loved her for that. He also needed her gone. If she drifted toward the casino doors and saw him on one knee inside, the whole plan collapsed. She'd wave. She'd call him honey. The caravan queen would learn his name wasn't Sunfire, and that he had a girlfriend, and that the river story came from a movie. Starburst crept out from behind the sedan and walked toward Butterfly with his palms open. "Clerk says the road's washed out south," he said. "Gonna take him another hour to draw the detour." She nodded like he'd handed her a flower. "I'll wait by the bus, love." "No." He took her hands. Her fingers were warm and dry. "I want you to drive ahead. Find us a good spot to camp. Somewhere with those little yellow flowers you like." Her eyebrows lifted. In eleven years he had never sent her ahead. "By myself?" "You're the one with the eye for it." She studied his face. For one bad second he thought she saw through him, all the way down. Then her smile came back, soft and full. "Okay, Starburst." She kissed his cheek. "Don't be long." He watched her climb into the rusted bus and coax it into a cough. The tires crunched gravel. The bus rolled out past the faded lot and shrank down the dust road until it was a smudge, then nothing. He let out a breath he'd been holding since sunrise. Then he turned toward the casino doors and saw the caravan queen already standing under the sign, arms crossed, watching him kiss another woman goodbye.