MicroHorror

The wanderer found him in the desert, beggared and bleeding with the severed shackles on his ankles stretched out beside him like strange, metal snakes. He had a bullet in his leg. The wanderer bandaged it. Poured water down his throat. After a while, the outlaw sat up. He looked at the bandage.

“I thank ye. I’d have died out here.”

“Likely.”

They were sitting at the edge of a playa where the velvet mesquite provided what little shade it could. Something small and scaly slithered past, unnoticed.

“Ye ain’t got any tobacco on you, do ye?”

“I ain’t,” said the wanderer.

“Didn’t allow ye did. Why’re you out here, anyhow?”

The wanderer sipped from a canteen. “I came out here lookin’ for somethin’.”

“Prospector?”

“Somethin’ like that.”

“Did ye find what you were lookin’ for?”

The wanderer looked at the small wooden box in his hands and rubbed it. “I did.”

“Somethin’ valuable?”

“Priceless.” He nodded at the outlaw’s severed shackles. “I can reckon why you’re out here. What trouble you in?”

The outlaw drank. “Got sprung from jail in Saltillo.”

“Ye got out with only one bullet in ye?”

“It wasn’t easy. Had to burn the goddam jail down. The feller that sprung me didn’t fair as well as me.”

“Where’s he?”

“Layin’ in the streets, twitchin’ and bleedin’.”

“Why was you in jail in the first place?”

“I shot some folks. Don’t care to tell it.”

They sat for a while, and then the outlaw said, “I best head out.”

“Ye cain’t walk on that leg, mister. Best to rest a while.”

“I don’t aim to walk.” He gestured at the wanderer’s horse. Then he pointed his pistol at the wanderer’s head.

“Why don’t ye give me what you found in this desert so I can be on my way.”

The wanderer sat blinking. “You serious?”

The outlaw cocked the pistol.

“You’d draw down on the man that saved yer life?”

The outlaw wanted what he had, and he saw no use in discussing it.

He shot the man in the face.

The wanderer’s head exploded and he fell over. There was no blood. No bone or brains. His head came apart as fog, like a hand passing through a smoke ring, and as the outlaw watched, the smoke swirled about the wanderer’s neck until it coalesced once again into the shape of a head. A grinning head. He sat up again.

“You’re a bad one, ain’t ye?” said the wanderer.

The outlaw began to slide backwards across the playa, both pistol and bravado now abandoned, but the wanderer was upon him before he had even moved two feet across that lakebed.

“I thought ye wanted to see what I came out here for.” He raised his arm. It was comprised of smoke entire. Ghostly. The wispy trails of it twisting in the breeze, sliding across the wanderer’s fingers, and then merging with the arm again like purposeful fog.

The outlaw never screamed. Not even when the wanderer took his spectral arm and slammed it into his chest. He felt the vaporous fingers sliding past bone and wrap around his pounding heart. He squeezed for a moment, and then the wanderer snatched it out amid a shower of bloody flesh. The wanderer held it out with the blood running through his fingers. The last thing the outlaw saw in this world was what the wanderer had came to the desert for.

His beating heart.

The wanderer rose, still clothed in smoke, and opened the small wooden box and dropped the heart inside. He went to his horse. A bag was stretched across the animal’s back. Inside sat dozens of wooden boxes, each alike in that they all held what the wanderer had come for at one time or another. He dropped the outlaw’s box inside among its new brethren.

“Welcome home, ole boy,” he said, and then he rode on for the town of Ajo.

• Copyright: © 2009 Trinity Martin