Everybody Scream! by Jeffrey Thomas

find that raucous celebration of life. But it was a celebration in another tone, a mean-spirited, misogynistic, ugly tone, and his former audience’s ardent embrace of these groups in his stead was what could inspire Del Kahn to resent them.
    Del hadn’t disowned his old work. But he had grown older, more experienced, more realistic, more sophisticated. He had matured. His old music was sometimes naïve. But people wanted to be naïve. They wanted to feel young, idealistic, passionate. Wasn’t he meant to entertain them, rather than inform them of what the dismal VT news could already tell them? Didn’t they want to laugh and cheer, rather than be moved to thought and tears? Why else had so many of Punktown’s diverse people, male and female, human and non-human, lifted him as their spokesman on their shoulders in the first place? They had given him what he had, right? So who was he to betray their trust and need?
    But Del Kahn wasn’t a factory machine designed to churn out a stale product. That was what he had always rebelled against in his songs! He didn’t feel that old burning optimism anymore. It made him as sad as any of his fans could be, but he had to be true to himself. He was an artist. He had hoped, in maturing, entering marriage, changing, that he could continue to express the feelings of his fans as they too matured and changed with the years. But they didn’t want that. Their bodies were changing, their lives were changing, but their emotions still clung desperately to the safe, naïve dreams of youth. If they became dislodged they would fall into the black void of growing old and facing the unpleasantries of life, such as a greater responsibility to their jobs, paying bills, responsibilities to wives and husbands and children–and dying. Del Kahn hated drug abuse. He had smoked seaweed here and there, but he had never even tried gold-dust once. He had urged his fans years ago to turn onto his music, not to drugs, to expand their horizons. Well, it had happened. Del Kahn had become a safe, transporting drug, offering release and escape. And now he had taken the drug away, and the escapists among his fans had turned to other drugs.
    Del stared into a pink whirlpool cloud of sugar, mesmerized. A hurricane spiral vortex. A paper cone moved into it, swept around the sides of the whirlpool, turning, gathering up a head of cloud sugar. Del’s lips molded into a faint smile. “That looks sexual.”
    “Everything looks sexual to you.” Too held up the finished cone of candyfloss, extended it to him. “A last cone for the year?”
    “Oh, how sweet.” Del took it.
    “Ha ha.”
    “I’d rather bury my nose into something even sweeter.”
    “Ha ha.”
    “Can I dip my love cone into your sugar pit?”
    “Someone told me somebody did that–she read it in a letter to a sex magazine,” said Too, growing animated. “This guy put his thing in a candyfloss machine and his girlfriend and her sister ate it off.”
    Del laughed. “Oh, come on…the magazines write those letters.”
    “No they don’t, do they?”
    “ Yes! ” Del laughed. “Man.” He took a bite of the cloud; it reverted back to a crunchy sugary liquid in his mouth. “Our last day together. You’re going to school, and you may not be here next year. We may never see each other again. Your last chance to seduce me.”
    “Geesh, I’m heartbroken. I ought to let you have sex with me, and then suddenly pull my fake eyes out.” It wasn’t just anyone she confided in about her eyes. “How’d you like that?”
    “Honey, you don’t know me. I’ve had Tikkihotto girls. This one girl wrapped her eyes around my rod, pumped me until I thought I’d explode, and then used them to put me in her mouth.”
    “Well, all I have left is little stubbly ends, Del, sorry–but then, I guess that’s all I need to handle your thing, huh?”
    “I told you not to make fun of my penis. I happen to like single-celled organisms.”
    Loud rock music