Thrust Read Online Free PDF Page A

strength.   Package and sell it, condense it to diamond.
    The goth chicks stared at him wondering why he wasn't wearing a leather jacket in eighty degree weather, where his eye-liner was.   They could smell death on him but couldn't figure out why he didn't have any tattoos of black roses or ravens.  
    It happened like that from time to time.
    The muscles in Timmy's arms and neck rose as he tensed, in case he had to dive over the bar and get Chase in a full nelson.   The fey girl was swishing her hips and taking a last pull of her drink.   None of them had copies of his book on the bar.
    Chase made the effort to appear sheepish but it wasn't his strong suit anymore.   He hoped he appeared disarming.   He had seen photos of himself when he looked like a leering lunatic and couldn't recognize his own face.   That sort of thing seemed to come and go.
    Timmy Wiggs took a chance and said, "Ladies, let me introduce you to the, ah, star of tonight's show.   Grayson Chase."
    Oddly enough, there weren't any cheers or tears of joy.  
    Nobody waved their hands about their face.   No one offered a name.   They said their hellos and stared at each other.   He still hadn't met any of the founding members of the Grayson Chase Fan Club, and he'd been looking for years.   It was starting to worry him.
    "You really don't have much talent," one of the leather- deather chicks told him.  
    "You caught me," he said.   "I've been waiting for somebody to finally nail my ass with the truth."
    "That game you played tonight, it didn't mean anything, now did it?"  
    Asking for affirmation, as though he might hang his head and go, yup, ayup .   He was fascinated by her black lips, outlined in brown pencil.   The disgust twisting in her scowl, as if he represented everyone she'd ever hated.
    "It meant something," Chase said, letting the smile out inch by inch until it felt wrapped halfway around his head.  
    "More than I could ever guess?" she asked.  
    "You could guess if you cared to."
    "That's the point, isn't it?   Getting strangers to care."   Not so much mocking him as ignoring him even while she was watching him.   He looked at the other girl and couldn't tell them apart.   Twin week-old corpse babes, night of the living dead X-gens.   He kept blinking as though they might refocus back into one person.   It gave him the heebie jeebies .
    She turned her head and he heard the creaking of her leather bra beneath the black lace.   "Sorry you hated the work."
    "I didn't.   I love your poetry."
    They pulled this kind of reversal on him every once in a while.   You had to go with it, wait it out.   "Oh.   Then thanks."
    "You just don't have a talent for performance art.   That's not work, not the way you do it.   Pretty stupid, really.   Stay out of Shake's light.   It takes a different kind of artist to hold a crowd in a barroom than it does to hold a reader to the page.   You're the type that does better holed up in burning hot apartment, sweating your balls off, puking in your bathtub, then crawling back to write some more."
    She'd heard the stories about him, anyway, and those particular ones were true.   She was interested enough to throw them back in his face.  
    He said, "I don't drink anymore."
    "You should.   It'll help keep you from cutting your own throat."
    He wanted to ask, yeah, but for how long?  
    She turned away then, the two mirroring each other's gestures and expressions, proud of themselves.   He wanted to explain that if they knew anything about death at all they wouldn't paint themselves black and white, dress up in satin, plastic, and gossamer tatters.   You'd be naked, the color of flames, of pink water, of rotting back teeth, the color of your mother's colon cancer.   Your father's brains on the carpet three weeks after he was buried.
    You got up to the big edge and then you pranced around it, backed off, went on again.   That's how you managed to get up in the morning, head to the job,