HologramRoseBudd

Captain Kirk

and static takes love’s body, wipes it clean and gray. Waves of white sound break along a beach that isn’t
there. And the tape ends.

Parker lies in darkness, recalling the thousand fragments of the hologram rose. A hologram has this quality:
Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling toward delta, he sees
himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing a whole he’ll never know - stolen credit cards - a
burned out suburb - planetary conjunctions of a stranger - a tank burning on a highway - a flat packet of drugs - a
switchblade honed on concrete, thin as pain.
Thinking: We’re each other’s fragments, and was it always this way? That instant of a European trip, deserted in
the gray sea of wiped tape - is she closer now, or more real, for his having been there?
She had helped him get his papers, found him his first job in ASP. Was that their history? No, history was the
black face of the delta-inducer, the empty closet, and the unmade bed. History was his loathing for the perfect
body he woke in if the juice dropped, his fury at the pedal-cab driver, and her refusal to look back through the
contaminated rain.
But each fragment reveals the rose from a different angle, he remembered, but delta swept over him before he
could ask himself what that might mean.