Tack

The Ember

Earth particles rose and danced and caught the last sunlight as night settled. And the coast shuddered, clacked and then fell silent on the rise and fall of pelagic periods. The trim and death lingered, dripped on the quiet. He brought The Ember up from the shadowed swells dry. Its length steamed and cracked, holding a pebble of intensity glowing under its rails. The forest moaned and he leaned The Ember toward the bulbous trunk of a shadowless oak. He

watched the board. It listed and seethed and he could smell the smoldering. He drank his grappa and drifted, tried to call upon the sliding, gravity, warmth under the blankets of Pacific curl. Warmth? He woke to a fierce and compound radiance lapping and lunging toward him, the forest all around gripped in flame. The Ember stood in a char, glowing and sputtering fire in the blue night. Smoke billowed across the plain and the fire consumed him and all that had grown or died in its path. He burned.

January 2012 // //
The Ember

Marten

She watched the coyote run along the canyon rim, the sunrise opening at its side. In that primordial dawn the world presented her could only be half-known for the dark yet at rest over the deep canyon seam like water on reef. She imagined what remained unknown—with care of thought, giving shape and character to that great mosaic with fragments of herself, many of these fractions too unknown except for tone or hue of life—and she knew that this was how she met the world irrespective of light or dark, and that all experience was a

collage at once without and within. She watched the coyote lope that terminus of plain, halting occasionally to test the air, to investigate the earth, and she knew that the coyote too must imagine itself on the earth for it to be. Would it fail to do so, the coyote would lose its world and be lost to the world, as if in the Earth’s spinning it would become detached and conveyed tangentially into the void. But she knew it would not fail to do so, for anything that breathes cannot help but appraise the air.

November 2011 // //
Marten

Grisea

She made the edge of town full out, the pair of them leaving a violent wake of air in the road such that the townsfolk feared to cross it behind her. She rode with the reins in her teeth, securing away in the folds of her clothing what medicines the general store could manage. When they gained the draw the horse had been at it for three-quarters of an hour and still they quickened with the promise of home. She found him as she had left him, prone across the kitchen table. He had refused to bleed the bed but she knew really that all that down suffocated him. She’d laid him out there where they’d taken meals and each other, and propped his head and drew the blinds against the morning sun and he didn’t move the long she was gone. Now the blood pooled apple-shaped on the floor tile, having run the length of a dangling arm and circled a hand and finally a finger before leaving him absolutely. She stood in the door and stared at

the pool of blood and then at him, who with his other hand atop his heart shocked her with his fragility. It was the shock of seeing oneself in another—and how that makes the whole world uncertain. His chin rolled a half-circle and his jaw lolled unconsciously and she regained enterprise and stepped to him and began the work of unwrapping the caked and crackling muslin smelling of iron. The hole in him was small and she couldn’t believe that he’d leave her through it. She looked at the metal she pulled from him. It had furrowed but hadn’t come apart. The metal bounced on the tile and she took care to clear the hole of any other trespass of clothing and earth and she was a long time at stopping the new hastening of blood. Once she had him stitched and wrapped he took water and medicine and the next day he woke to her rubbing salve into his scabbed lips. She spoke to him but his voice was imperceptible and he took more water. “You lost an eyebrow,” she said. “Reckon it couldn’t be helped,” his reply mostly a dry wind. “Feel alright to breathe against that table?” He nodded. “I spat on your arm there,” she said. He looked down at his body for the first time since waking. “Didn’t notice.” She wiped at his forearm. “Doesn’t change the fact.” He looked from his arm and her hand there to her. “I aint going nowhere,” he said. She shook her head. She nodded. She whispered to him and sat the evening with him and the night, and the days thereafter.

October 2011 // //
Grisea

Lord Baltimore III

The man long disappeared and thought dead still had road in him. His side was split and he leaked through it and leaked through the moss wrapped tight around him with muslin. His skin was alternately ashen and bright in the mottled sunlight through the canopy of trees high above and his bloodless hands circled loosely the reins that bounced in his lap above legs as inanimate as the fenders they rode against. Despite it all and more he sat his mount with a redwood-straight spine and without fight in his face. The horse’s progress felt cushioned to him and he thought that this must be what rolling along the sea must feel like and he left with the thought and was carried by a rolling sea born of the back of his throat toward a false horizon to fold on the edge of his mind. It was less the blood loss than this hallucination that threatened to end

him so he pulled himself back in with an imagined but painfully felt rope at the center of his chest. He started and choked on the regained reality but breathed it easier after a time and clung to his destination even as the waves of fantasy flooded it and sent it sliding off the map of his mind. He pushed the water back and shook his head to be free of it because he knew it wasn’t real and focused on that place of medicine. Grisea would be there and hold him high above the sea so as to make it inert. She would be air still enough to lay upon.

July 2011 // //
Lord Baltimore III

El Sapo

The fishermen sat on the seawall paying only peripheral attention to their lines. Neither’s heart enjoyed the subtle weightlessness that forecasts a good haul of fish. Heavy breakfasts—the fishermen only breakfast on inauspicious mornings—pulled at their shoulders and the food felt still in their gut as the whole world was still and reluctant. The wet air breathed thick with the fog warming fast as the darkness ripened into morning and the waxed canvas of their coats did not breathe and the men sweat uncomfortably under them but preferred the discomfort to the heavy burden of fog soaked underclothes. The younger of the fishermen began talking if only to launch a momentum that would break the world of its lethargy. His senior companion became aware of the talk as one might suddenly recognize that day turned night without any memory of evening. The young fisherman talked of a missed opportunity to crew on the harbor’s most successful boat that season. In the dark hours of a morning a week into the season, a deckhand didn’t show and the boatswain held an impromptu hiring among the few fishermen already setting up along the seawall. Sensing a break that could turn his fortune, the young fisherman stole himself and when the boatswain came to him he let the boatswain see in his eyes the full measure

of his confidence. But the full measure of the young man went unseen behind his slight frame and the boatswain chose for his deckhand a broad-shouldered, long-armed man the rest of the fishermen of the seawall knew to be unlucky. The young fisherman was confounded that the boatswain of such a renowned vessel could not see into a man and know him as a fisherman can see into the sea and know it. The old fisherman took in the story but did not pity the youth for he knew the young fisherman’s instincts were unmatched on the seawall and that what he lacked in stature he more than made up for in will. Silence once again arrested the world and it was a long time before the old fisherman told the youth that it matters not what the boatswain can or can’t see in a man. He asked the young fisherman if it mattered to him, fishing from the seawall, if that boat catches one or one hundred fish today. The youth shook his head. The old fisherman said it is the same—that what is in a man only matters to that man and that the sea does not need to be seen and known to be full.

June 2011 // //
El Sapo

One Mississippi

The boy crouched under the torn and rippling blue tarpaulin, his skin blue and the rusted disks of the tiller blue and everything down to the mud-trod twigs on the ground glowing the watery hues of the little world’s nylon lid. His chest heaved from the sprint behind the barn and he wondered if the rush of wind through the trees had done enough to muffle his scurry under the snapping tarp. Shifting to a squat he breathed in the cool damp and looked up through the holes in the cloth to the flat gray sky. Frayed weave dangled from the tears, spinning about his forehead with the shifts of the tarp and twisting across his vision like something alive. A strand caught his eye and he hung his head between his knees to blink away the sting. The blurring sharpened and looking at his boots he noticed a mass

of crushed dry leaves and dirt pasted to the inner edge of boot tread with something white and dripping. He ran a finger through the gunk and brought it close to his face and smelled it. It registered just as the blue canopy imploded and swallowed him in roiling crackling blue and the soak of cold ground. The new weight beyond the nylon pressed and bound him and he fought for leverage and his hand sought an edge to pull himself from the rolling mess. He got a foot under the mass pressed against the tarp and, with his back to the ground, kicked out. The weight lifted from the tarp and the boy clawed at the tarp until he was free of it. His brother lay a few feet away propped on his elbows and carrying a grin. “Good spot. Shame you ran through dad’s spilled fence paint. Wasn’t much for sport.” The boy didn’t answer but pushed the tarp aside and removed his shoes and crossed his legs in front of him. “Going Indian on me, huh?” His brother wondered looking around. “Best get myself disappeared then.” And he stood and took off running just as the boy closed his eyes and began, “One Mississippi two Mississippi three Mississippi…”

May 2011 // //
One Mississippi

The Manzanita Heart

The sea bore him on her storm-ravaged back away from the flames that raced to consume the sinking ship before her waters must. She bore him away from that expiring light through the darkness of those last few hours of night and into the gray dawn, his sodden arms knotted around a snapped plank of cedar hull. The gray light rolled dull yellow as the morning shed its fog and revealed to him its infinite shoulders. No, not shoulders. Land. A cliff face ceaseless in either direction. He looked for a landing and paddled for an abutment of rock stretched from the cliff face and doubled back on itself. The sea lurched to heaven and fell away beneath him and his strokes at times pulled only at air and at others struggled to pull him back to the surface. He rounded the horn of fallen rock and with the land in arms reach slid from the plank, pushing it from him and dividing their futures. The concussion of wave on the opposite side of the rock signaled the swelling of water around him, lifted and deposited him high on the mantle of stone slick with kelp likewise deposited. He wrapped his hands in the kelp and heaved his body, heavy with the sea still lashing at him, up the arête toward the cliff face. Rocks spilled over with the viscous salt water eventually gave way to rock misted with the breath of the sea and his feet found themselves and he soon stood at the foot of the cliff face. He climbed, the rock good under his hands. The rock was not the sodden wood plank, not the sea twisting from his grip to slap him across the head. He thought the rock sincere. If it were unstable it would tell him as much when tested with a false weight and so he only trusted his hands and feet on rock that promised security. His limbs expelled the heavy soak of sea and forgot their fatigue in the new work. His mind too became singular. There is only the work and the work must only be done. If he could reach the top, he would regain decision. He climbed on and when his hands could no longer close around the stone he rested an age on a ledge set back deep enough for him to sprawl across. Eventually he pulled himself up to lean against the wall and removed his shirt

and tore it into strips that he wrapped around his abrased palms and the cracked and bleeding soles of his feet. He stood and looked to his ascent and sat again and rested a bit longer. He climbed on and eventually stood on the penultimate ledge. The last length of wall was featureless, a stone mirror, and too high to bound. His heart sank leaden through his gut. The limb of a tree hung over the precipice. He knew this tree as Manzanita and knew it would be difficult to gain purchase on its skin-slick bark. He knew there to be no way to test it with a false weight. There would be only his weight. His mind darkened with fatigue and despair and he looked at the branch and imagined approaching the tree from the other direction, walking up to it and resting against the tree, leaning into the tree and feeling all that flat earth beneath him while looking out over all that expanse of sea and wondering how it would be to be trapped in it. He shook free of the dream and looked down at the blue and frothing sea and wondered if his making it this far mattered if he were only to meet his end down there where the day had begun. He reached above and took hold of the thin limb and couldn’t help but think it may be the last thing he would hold and he let the acid thought drip down through him where it ate at what was left of his strength. He breathed deep into reserved will and expanded it and thought so be it already and matched his grip on the branch with the other hand and leaned back, suspended over what had passed and what may come.

May 2011 // //
The Manzanita Heart

Willie

That there’s Pockets. Handy with a rifle but a damned sight with short guns. Won the moniker blasting daylight through the trousers of a fellow card player reluctant to part with his losings. From a dozen paces he undid the stitching of the man’s pockets with .45 caliber efficiency, spilling their keep of coin and paper across the decking. Pockets took his time getting up from the table and by the time he stood before the man the man’s earthbound debts were soaked through with his own cowardice. Pockets looked at the sponge of piss that was the man’s billfold and walked past the man to look to the rest of his day. Some drunk snickered to the man that the man’s levy done sprung leaks and that was that. Fella at the pots is Lucy, the crew’s cook. Never a meal by his hand you wouldn’t believe was conceived by the devil hisself. Hot is the base he builds from and even a breakfast of flitch and eggs

beads the forehead. Cooter’s yonder spitshining his boots. Dresses fancy like a politician but he’s nationless as the rest of us. Always flipping through the French dressing papers and talking of “hot cooter” or some such nonsense. But anyway, it stuck, as nonsense is prone to. One on his horse anxious to hit the town is Blue. Can’t recall what inspired that name but I’m sure he’d tell ya. Aint nothing blue about him. Talk yer ear off two times. Idea of heaven is close quarters with more people than squarefeet, bottomless liquor, bottomfull company, gunfire and piana. Hates these hills and all their quiet. Confounds why he’d outlaw. Slight kid yonder with the guitar is Willie. Only threw in with the bunch 10 months ago but was a brother the first day. Voice of a damn angel for his stillness outside of song. Weaves peculiar stories when he sings, like how his father was an elk and his mother was an elk and his children will be elk if only the moon marry the sun. Gentle boy and like Blue I can’t reckon why he’d take to thieven. But I can neither. There’s just too much damn life in it. Lawbiden fills the room in a man’s heart with so much guilt and compromise, and this bunch sees fit to fill theirs otherwise.

April 2011 // //
Willie

Le Poisson

The clouds rolled and split their bellies on the mountain ridges that held patient vigil around the valley. He picked with an ambivalent thumbnail at a pebble wedged in the tread of his boot heel, his eyes draped over the morning’s calamity. “Yup.” He abandoned the task at foot and stood and leaned against the fender of his incapacitated truck, high-centered on a berm born of heavy snowmelt across the road. The clay had overtook the running boards and halted a quarter of the way up the passenger door, bordered there by the eggshell paint gone yellow and rusting—the color his kid sister called Burnt Marshmallow with appreciation. He checked the sun and scanned the riverbank quickly falling under shadow. “Good a place…” He round the bed, mud sucking at his boots, grabbed his fly-rod and tackle basket and quit the wet red road for the bank of carved river-stone. The chill off the fleuve wrapped around him

and he busied himself tying on a fly, thinking of the warm jade toobs that this season of tree-planting would afford him. He sang to push the cold to the outside of his skin, “Diggin a ditch where madness gives, diggin a ditch where silence lives, diggin a ditch for when I’m old.” Three stones with a leap between each saw him to a low boulder midstream. The wicker basket waited to be filled at his feet as he set the bamboo and line into false casts, hauling line from the reel with his free hand. The line arced back and forth above as he relaxed into the action’s shapes and scanned the water. He presented the fly in a dead drift on a pool protected by a wide granite step. With a heavy immediacy he felt in his gut, time slowed and matched the fly’s float across the pool. He held that feeling long after he exhaled the last of a breath until time exploded with an unnatural tug on the line. He set the hook and there was a hammering as the fish ran and the surface bent and shattered with each breaching twist of scale and fin. There was arc in the fish and arc in the rod. There was arc in his back and in his fingers and there was arc in the stone and in his feet across it. There was arc in the berm yonder and in the thoughts visited there. There was arc in the sky and in the fish’s gut and in his gut but between them was a straight line.

February 2011 // //
Le Poisson

The Law

His tongue was dry in the dark of the train car. An old and weathered chin, crusted and quivering atop the redwood stump of his neck, he sat watching the storm form above the Plain. The rusted iron wreck of his shelter stood decrepit, off-track in a rotting steel pile miles out of town where the entrails of trains had been cast off and fallen. In old age collected, his booty and life’s work surrounded him; the jewelry of heists, the billfolds and satchels of men smoked and fallen to his temper, a longboard of towering magnificence paid to him for sins no man could be forgiven. The Law, intimately crafted and ritually

glossed, was the commission paid on a woman’s head he meticulously tracked through the southern borderlands and dust, the lust of his youth. When he found Celeste, she begged he surf instead. She said he didn’t have to and that she would go, vanish and leave him to collect his bounty. For a moment, he thought of waves on The Law. A hissss, dropping in and GEEESH!, hacks to an elegant noseride to track the board into the pocket. He burned those dreams as the sick waves of his imagination fell closed and there was just the white foam of his fury. He turned to her in that instant, gunned her down and left her body. Here in the dark, years past, The Law, like so many other thieven treasures laid unspoiled, unsurfed, to remind him of desolation, land, the heat of his own blood boiled off in the dust of a trail decades away in the parched Plain.

February 2011 // //
The Law

Pelagic

She scrawls a wet finger across the powdery fiberglass hull gone pastel-blue and cracking. Dark shapes and characters restore the paint briefly and then evaporate. She draws a dry finger across the desiccate surface and pinches the chalky residue against her thumb and imagines the dust tugging at the moisture beneath her skin. She dips a

finger in the water again and writes a word and watches it disappear. She writes it again and turns away before it vanishes. She pats away the dust from her trousers and looks down harbor at the collection of bows held fast in their slips. She thinks of the night before, in earshot of a fish-stinking sailor who chased cheap gin with a moral—“The wind just twists every goddamn thing.” No, she thought. The wind just blows. She looks down the bows and down at her own and moves to loose it because all she wants is to let it run.

February 2011 // //
Pelagic

The Manzanita Heart / Prologue

The water is black and her eyes are black. The winds tangle, kicking up spires of water, dark and sparkling. It is a twisted brawl of winds—each with its own temperature, source. Earlier the sea was quiet—the few souls spread out up and down the point and bowed to deeper water, like so many late-night churchgoers scattered amongst the pews, looking for a different kind of company. The gray cows grazed in the green fields around her and up the rocky and disintegrating point. Clangs of bells lost their way across the water. The chapel’s bells or the cows’, she cared not to find difference between them. The evening was content to sit in its lavender veil, ever knowable, threatening nothing so unpredictable as night. But even as she sat in the evening she knew it was a lie and that every evening falls out of balance in favor of the night and she grew impatient for the truth of it. Now

she slides in the water that is the mercury moon moving across obsidian. She feels the water against the skin over her heart and feels the water connected to the water pressing against the cedar hull of a far off ship and she is careful not to push the water for all that water between them being pushed would crush the hull like a dry seed. Winds, hot and glacial, twist and throw the water, the nearby trees into each other. Their leaves fall differently and beneath the water’s surface it is different, still. The sky too is still, honest and apathetic to the buffeting of winds against everything in-between and the skin over her heart.

September 2010 // //
The Manzanita Heart / Prologue

Clayfellow

He wound the loose leather of the buggy whip in a series of loops and tied off the coils with a clasp. He eyed the grip a last time. Satisfied with the tackiness of the wrap, he set the whip to lean against the carriage’s goose-necked shifting rail. He relaxed into the cushioned back of the carriage seat, happy with the shade and the gentle afternoon offshores that swirled under the canvas top. He rubbed an apple on the lapel of his jacket and watched drops of water break apart on his boots propped against the dash rail. His gaze followed the drops up to Clayfellow, already racked atop the carriage but still sweating the day’s surf. Beads of seawater clung to the rails of the board and refracted the sun in urchins of white light. Without taking his eyes from this kaleidoscope, he set the virgin fruit into the tuck ‘n roll and reached below the seat cushion to slide forth his ipad. His fingers deftly cross-stepped apps to finally come upon the desired tool and he did no fewer than nine and six contour studies until he was satisfied he had captured the sight, filing away in his mind colors of note that when matched with the sketches later would form the skeleton of art. He returned the ipad to its recesses and took up the apple and bit into it. He swallowed and whistled for

his dog and Dyl’n looked up and lingered a moment as if to excuse herself from the children with whom she played in the sand and heeled at a trot to the side of the carriage. She stood with straight legs upon the long-step and met his palm with her forehead. “Where’s monkey?” he asked. Her ears peaked. “Where’s lobster?” Her tail in wider arcs. “Where’s China?” She leapt and spun from the step racing for the water’s edge and tumbled through the sand, digging and throwing great pawfulls behind her. Alright, he thought, and swung out from the cockpit and balanced on the axel nut as he loosed Clayfellow from its braces. As he paddled he watched the water dangle and drop diamonds from his fingers in their half-work, the prisms viscous and suspended as if extensions of skin, nail. Now make the world of me as I have made a merry manshape of your walking circle, he thought and grinned as he matched the sea, stood, and walked upon it.

July 2010 // //
Clayfellow

The Evening Bell

Grease had long settled in the cracks of his hands and in the cracks in the molded steering wheel that the cracks in his hands wrapped around and matched in a gentle symmetry. The headlights, tired like the man and yellowed like the truck, labored to keep pace with the truck and advance light across the asphalt like yellow seafoam up a black-sand beach and the man thought the truck of its heavy inertia downhill may overtake its own light. He downshifted without thinking about it and felt the burden of the flatbed shift and settle into a new shape. The split-pane windshield plowing the thick
summer air was as murderous as he’d seen, and he thought of the truck’s light and that even in its inadequacy, it was yet the brightest piece of the night and life was hurrying to end itself against it. But the man is a father, and as a father he goes into the night. He doesn’t blink at the snap of the tarpaulin catching the wind and ignores the rearview in favor of the glow advancing on blacktop, assured in the security of his load.
July 2010 // //
The Evening Bell

Ol’ Grandad

Ol’ Grandad woke to a nosebleed that he staunched with his shirt tail and as he did so he swept the bits of straw from his neck and shoulders. His shoulders were square and solid for how his elbows creaked and locked as he saddled Water Back. The latigo swung loose as he led the horse out of the stall where they had slept a windy night in the dark of the hills just off the plain. Grandad stood in the sun, his hand on Water Back’s face and he thought of his youth and the early surfs and barrels he pioneered off the coast, down out of the scrubs and at the end of steep trails that were muddy in the winter months. He thought of his youth before the sea and early and only love and a family sown and lost in the deep gorges outside Pigeon Falls. Water Back whinnied and he bound

the latigo and mounted. He sat the horse and reached without looking to the saddle bag behind him and produced half a bar of wax and rubbed the wax on his calloused palms and the pads of his fingers and returned the wax and rubbed his hands together and breathed deeply into his hands. The oils of his calluses blended in the blueberry scent and the coconut bled over his gnarled fingers. His cloudy eyes glistened pale like the wave crests he imagined and his ears echoed the crashes of whitewater and he looked on as he rode the hills.

July 2010 // //
Ol’ Grandad

Lord Baltimore II

Lord Baltimore was the most revered tracker of the Plain. The winds whispered the footprints of outlaws in his ears under the stars next to the crackling warmth, and in the morning he found the scents of men’s spurs on the blades of each tumbling weed over the land, gunned them down and collected his bounty. Like saddle’s wear across the life of a once wild stud, he quit the plain one winter, shacked up in the shop of his nascent glassing, covered in dust, unhealed and scathed from so many climbs over the pinnacles dividing the Plain, always in search of the toob that would deliver him from a torturous and leashless being.

Drew pulled him down one day, Nate pulling at his shirtsleeves to leave the old bones be up in the webs and rafters of the shop. But Drew laid his hand down on his revolver at his belt, and a new life bequeathed Lord Baltimore. In a new shape and resin-pelted spring sheathing Lord Baltimore II is feared, shredding.

July 2010 // //
Lord Baltimore II

L’Autruche

Much obliged to Lil’ Sar 6-Guns for her work with quill and camera.

July 2010 // //
L’Autruche

Jacqueline hugs The Boyd Model II (with boot)

Found little Jacqueline nursing a tired mare down the dusty highway off Two Bar Road. I knelt down on the dirt and scooped her up in a swaddling mildewed towel used on so many bodies cold from Pacific toobs, her pucker still aggressive on my shirtsleeve, and folded her into the bed of the pickup. The Boyd Model II waited by the fire when I brought her down off the ridge and it eyed her gently as she slept deep into the morn dreaming maybe of the mare or of the dusty
shaping room in ivy or the ride up 1o1 through the plain and rolling oaks to the North Coast. They have since felt akin, crafted from a like and talented hand that scoured the foam and sheared the glass noses of many before, and they have yet to be parted except on firey days of 8′+/10+sec.

July 2010 // //
Jacqueline hugs The Boyd Model II (with boot)

Celeste

Mace folded his cards face up across the green felt landscape of the table and drew from his tumbler an easy draught of bourbon, setting the glass down softly and without sound. The spades like Comanche warriors, howling and painted, darting across the room and through the man at the end of their projection, caught building a small cooking fire at dawn, back peddling over pots and cans and saddles, clawing for his rifle, yelling for the children to hide, cards still in hand. “You know,” Mace said from behind his sleeve as the back of his hand moved across his lips, his palette hot and wet and full of blood rushed up from the darker spaces of his chest, “Celeste is expecting me home for supper, so I’ll need your payout.” The words left the room and the man’s hand fell from the ridge of the table in a dash, followed his sides to the top of his revolver. The chair was blown out from under Mace’s position, snake boots shifting across the floor and spurs tearing dust-laden strips of cedar from slats below the dancing and fistfights and mildew and barley of the
saloon, his legs released into a stagger, and his guns blasting forth. “Celeste likes my appetite on nights like this. And toobs? Well.” Mace scowled. He adjusted his hat over a wild nest of serpentine shag and collected his guns, smoke pouring from the barrels like the spirits of demons dispatched to tear open the chests of cowardly and lesser men, retracted them into their leather sheathes. “Toobs haven’t been a-makin’ me a man.” The last of his bourbon he arced onto the floor. He spat and scraped the money from the center of the table, taking without hesitation the inked coins that lay in front of his opponent’s vacated post, the man’s leg entwined in his overturned chair, his vest open, hands laid palms praise to the ceiling. The bartender heard a soft whispering “Hssssssssssss Hsssssssss” and pulled his face from the whiskey and glass and spit and ash that coated the old brown floor behind the bar. His face breached the countertop, the doors of the saloon swinging gently in the night as if a breeze had convinced them that to sway is to shred, the space in between these lesser spoke of by decent men.

July 2010 // //
Celeste

The Decanter

Chickens scattered through the dust among the lame and mangy feral dogs and children stood stunned as their mothers screamed and fell to their knees. Men overtook elderly women prying at doors, tears streaming, bloody fingers clawing against hope, and crying in the heat. He climbed down off his steed, the white mustang sweating under the heavy woolen saddle pad, leather riding harness, nylon track suit. The leather of his belt etched in years worn, “Paolino” scribed along its length to join the twin pistols slung parallel on his hips, holding flush against his thighs with animal sinew. The Decanter he pulled

down and held it under his arm feeling the warm wax separate gently in his grip, the hot foil against his body and the shimmer of the rail like a heavenly port waning in the resurrection of a perfect saint’s ascent. Flies around a mule’s eyes collected in a toxic and bustling devilish hoard and sounded a lonely hiss across the silence of the dirt and heat welling up in the noontime. The cracking of a pistol cocked. He turned to address it.

July 2010 // //
The Decanter



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