Just Another Gunfight in the West

The reason why they shot him isn't that important. Wasn't that important to me then, either. Point is, he was shot, he was bleeding, and dying, and dead. Right there in front of my eyes. His blood on my hands, on my blue dress. My own wailing in my ears. Someone reached over with a calloused hand, and closed those blue eyes.

I hated that. I would have liked to look into them another moment, and now I couldn't. It would have been perverse to open them again. Is it even possible? I don't know. Never asked. Anyway, I left them closed, and looked on that sleeping face and was angry at him that he didn't wake.

Stupid, really. I know it. What can I say? Grief isn't clever.

Leastways, with his eyes open, he looked dead. If he were asleep here in the dust, then he could be woken, and yet he wouldn't wake, and this consumed a whole big bit of me. Dead was more awful, sure, but somehow cleaner at the same time.

Give it a beat, give it a hot minute, and look, he is only sleeping would be an ease to my battered little soul. But I wasn't quite there yet, and that dusty old hand was ahead of me. I wanted to slap it away, but too late, look, the shutters were down. Soul closed for business.

As dry as the dirt under my knees was, my tears should have made a river of it. They didn't. The ground swallowed up the heart and salt of me, and didn't care, spitting despair back at me.

He'd been sweet to me, and loved me, and I'd loved him back, and now he was dead, and the world turned anyway, awfully, spitefully.

Sometimes I look at the youngsters, crying just the same because their sweetheart left, or went sweet on someone else, and I think, you don't know pain, at least your love lives.

Could be I'm wrong, though. The pain is worse, but oh, the romance is so much greater, too, isn't it? This many years have swaddled my heart tight, and the pain is a distant whisper. The memory of him, alive and dead, venom-bright and arrow-sharp. There's never been a smile to match his, because how could there be? Now, I can blaspheme and admit it: his death made our love greater. Mine for him, and his for me. Who can say either of us no, in the circumstances?

I've loved since then, 'course I have. People are social creatures, even the anti-social ones have a streak of it in them. We have a vicious need to pair, and that's the truth of it. But I thought I'd love that boy until we were creaky and grey and then dead, and I was cheated of that. I had no wish to give that same gift to another.

His inopportune dying rewired me, anyhow. Love is a short-lived beast for me now, with no relation to loyalty. She blazes bright and fierce, but she burns out quick. Then my heart slows its beating, and stands ashen behind my ribs like a winter tree. Waiting for another Spring.

I think, when I'm even older than this, when I've gone right into the dribbling-and-worse phase, and out the other side... I fancy that Death will wave a bony hand and that will be me there, in the dust beside him, begging for those glassy eyes to reignite, for the cheeky grin to bounce back on to his face. For him to see me, to stir... and he will. He'll spring up, laughing, like a jack in the box. That pesky blood of his that flowed far too much, and then not at all, oh that won't matter one bit. His hand will be warm and vital in mine, and I'll smell the sweat of his shirt and feel his breath in my ear. He'll hug me back, tight, relief flooding us both I was nearly a goner! and it will be a beautiful day after all.

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