A Woman With a Past.

She floats.

The bathwater in their large brass tub ran an increasingly-brilliant crimson as she slid the straight razor over the meridian of her delicate wrists hardened by the frontier journey from the plains of Missouri to these cacti-covered hills of the Arizona territory. Their home was built and beautifully appointed, based purely on gambling and extortion, both as town marshal and at the poker tables and frontier billiard halls.

She floats.

His handlebar mustached face, chiseled yet spectral floated closer to her, enveloping her diminishing field of vision.

Will you cry o’er my bones my Eternal Love?

His face was stoic, silent… like the endless train of men she had been forced to be with before him. The nightmare floated away as tears ran down her radiant face — a Magdalean reflection of what she had been, demons she could not shake coming to painful life in the ether of her final curtain dementia.

She had always identified with Mary Magdalene when the preacher told her tale from Holy Writ. That is, when her husband drug her to Sunday services to keep up his appearance as the top lawman in these parts, a big iron always at the hip.

She floats.

Will you cry o’er me, my Eternal Love?

The twin bottles of laudanum and arsenic slipped clinking like Christ intervening to save the cheating woman from a stoning. Her salvation soon approaching.

Perhaps now she could get his attention from the poker tables and his desert-sized myth of top law enforcer. Cultivating that, whiskey, and the gambling tables left no room for love in what they had. A hollow shell of a marriage — a husk, as permanent as a wind-tossed valley tumble weed.

WILL YOU CRY O’ER MY BONES?!

His stoic face burned a seething red, his hawkish brown eyes boring a hole straight through her opium-swaddled soul.

WILL YOU, MY ETERNAL LOVE?!

He simply could not be seen consorting with prostitutes anymore, as his face slowly sunk into the void.

She felt herself floating up covered in the bloody bathwater. Slowly there materialized a long dark-haired, young woman dressed as the Holy Mother, leaving her to ask, “are you the Holy Mother?”

The vision embraced her as close sisters often do, whispering with a radiant yet world-weary expression as she looked into her eyes, “I am Mary Magdalene. We are sisters as women with a past.”

“I am not worthy to be counted amongst you and the Savior!”

The vision replied without moving her lips, “of course you are worthy! We are sisters in pain; sisters in daggers through the heart; sisters through selling ourselves and our own very agency; sisters of the wrong road; sisters of distilled sorrow more potent than anything your degenerate husband is drinking at this very moment as he rakes in piles of silver dollars; sisters in sin. But most importantly: we are sisters in change. Sisters in redemption.

They did the same thing to you that they did to me. I was the wife of Christ but the Church simply could not have that. Why? When Constantine saw the Chi Roh in the sky in battle and decided to finally stop persecuting us, they simple could not have the Savior consorting with a Woman with a Past. So, they tried to erase my existence altogether. But as you can see, they couldn’t. I’m still here.

The same will happen to you, my Sister. Because we are strong.”

Their embrace tightened as they floated. Tears streamed down her face at Mary Magdalene’s story.

“Multitudes will cry o’er your bones, Sister. Multitudes. Good-hearted men. And a woman with a past.”

A wry smile spread over her face and tear-filled eyes. “I am ready to go, Sister.”

Her eyelids drooping closed, she floated away.