Do you remember?
The Stranger through his cigarette smoking knows that when she’s come for him, and the hour is moonlit and lonesome, he will take her to the dead girl. – Watch closely, this to the hitcher whose eyes, when he reveals the girl’s stayed, sleepless body, her length a broken ramble in the trunk, must bloom with some queer awe he’s seen as only feminine edges before. In her, before. But it will burst whole here. This one he will love for as long as he can. She is the same color as the first man he murdered this far from the city lines, judged only by the ether abounding, driven past these gold fields kissed by green, life. The color has been fading since before he lost his deary girls, maybe before that, though the vagabond at his side brought them through this land The Stranger had never seen, not as he is if ever he saw it as he was. Said he knew of a place here in the outer plains. A town edged by some kind of infinity.
That one, he slept beside that one because his warmth would not fade.
Now Penny is in the Doorway of the hotel. What was it he said with blood dried on his boots to bring her from the shoulder and trust him? He saw the clouds gathering in her eyes before the storm. She would have felt the rain with an open palm, with her skin the color of the moon. When he heard that gunshot in his heart, no longer a memory but the moment as it was, a feral night that compassed him when he was apart from his deary, his Kristin, and the stolen bundle in her arms would bleat at their newfound distance; that suicide gunshot before everything. If it echoed through the real or the unreal, through visions he meant to forget, it was only to sunder, commence an aching. The gunshot was a perfect language, a lost tongue stained with love and death, each of them matted over the wanting pyre, where lovely are the suttee suicides. Down down as slivers of wonder and awe. And Penny held his chest till morning. If she sung he heard only his mother.
Do you remember?
– When the plains were green, do you remember, when they were still tall?
– Yes.
– And we were…
– Yes.
Kristin, do you remember?
He waits for the ash to warm his fingers. He breathes in once more that image of her sitting against her sack: the face of a girl awaiting the rain. In his turn toward the hitcher it loomed momentarily as a heartbeat stutter that without words would spirit him away. Though she asked across the street for him she deadened the moment as it came. Then go to her, says he to himself and the thieves who would listen. Go to her without the one some old digger has descended. Go without the boy he hopes is still in the cradle, small, always gathered to his mother’s breast and screaming so the world know he’s alive. A child born of the first deary he abandoned for the suttee gone from him. Victoria.
Penny waits naked. Her body as flawed as the hand and dress of a painter, or, no, not flawed: ecstatic. That hair still dark with rain laid violent upon her pale form. Those breasts held in queer shadows cast by one hand stepping across her belly, a curved handful shaded and calling, just beneath the smile he chose her for, to cut away from that cold face had not her countenance destroyed him that night he felt so alive. The knife let to plummet; a gunshot remembrance – the city behind tumescent with them both, with what Penny was not; and borne by his tumbrel were they before her, of whom he left only the bones. Bones against the fallow: each their arid acre. When The Stranger took this inviting hitcher he was too weak to essay and find remains in the wind, the remains of when he did not need her, Penny, for she is what came from sifting through the ashes of his new decay. She will not die when her eyes bloom so. He knows now. He knows when she comes and he lets his past into her all haunted and writhing and shattering his memories so the burning of her womb may forever keep them. When the length of broken ramble awaits, somewhere, beyond them there.
The sweat of his heart brings a rise and fall, finds her quiet rhythm and sleeps once more. This one he will love for as long as he can.
Brilliant.