you're too young & eager to love

More with the Western theme. With a slightly further developed character/plot.

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There’s a buckskin jacket draped over the singular chair in her room, and it isn’t hers. It’s worn and faded and stained, starting to shrivel like a dried plum. Clementine doesn’t wear it but keeps it like a decoration, the only one she’s got. Her walls are empty and there’s nothing but a bottle of whiskey on the dresser, a pocket lamp lighter, and a basin made of porcelain beside a silver pitcher for washing.

The jacket smells like cow pelt, like an old blanket, or a bad memory.



Her life’s setup is easy. A simple chain, not hard to follow up or down.

The building, the saloon, is considered fashionable. One of the newer models that the Mayor likes to boast over (the Mayor never chooses her now; he doesn’t fancy girls with scars). The bottom level is for the general business, the townsfolk and the regulars, coming for hands of poker and drinks from the bar. There’s a piano and a singer that’s almost on note, both hardwood planks and carpet that’s kept clean despite the cigar smoke and gunpowder, and a man working the crowd with a mustache that Clementine always wants to pull. The girls mingle, mostly dressed, lips fresh and throats full of laughter. They hang on arms and whisper into the ears of the young and the old, the restless and the quick.

There’s two floors on top of the saloon, and the men win more there than they do gambling.

Clementine’s room is on the second level, the fifth on the left. Her door is usually closed during the hours she works, and she’s known for her enthusiasm, for the groan of the mattress beneath her, and the unruly way she wears her hair. Some nights, all she sees is regulars. Other nights, there’s strangers that choose her with a flick of their eyes, a deal exchanged for a price between the Madame and the clients. Clementine’s profession doesn’t allow the luxury of a choice; she’s never minded.

The Madame is a round, friendly woman. She treats her girls well, taking a percentage with fat fingers. The owner maintains the property as a whole, a slim and older man that wears silk vests and acts like God. He calls himself a good Christian, as long as everyone pays their share.



The town has a lot of blood.

She’s happy to contribute every month. Gets a flush of relief when the pains start in her belly and she can’t work for a week. She finds other ways to amuse herself, wearing more clothes than usual, piling her hair up in cosmopolitan fashion to stroll the streets. The sand and dust gathers on her skirts, slips between her eyelashes, and sometimes she thinks she can feel it on her tongue.

When most of the women cross the street to avoid her path, or refuse to meet her gaze, Clementine rolls her shoulders back and picks her chin up higher.

“Independence is what I’ve got.” She tells her reflection in front of the Chinese shop window, smoothing her hands across her bodice. Inside, the air is heavy and damp, and the men don’t refuse her entrance or her money. Her coins are good, and she doesn’t mind their foreign skin and the oiled braids that is their hair. She likes these dens, likes that for once the men inside aren’t focused on her at all. Likes the long pipes and the sweet, sweet smoke.




One night, there’s a man waiting for her. He leans against the window with a bulking frame, large like an ox. He smells like the buckskin jacket, and Clementine almost vomits right then and there. With the help of a Bowie knife, he peels an orange all in one strip, and that’s what she remembers most vividly. “Clem.” Like spitting something out of his mouth.

“Pa.” She says, or maybe she didn’t.

(She knows she screamed - when the warmth of blood across her cheek ripped through her shock. Making enough ruckus eventually caused a stir. The Madame didn’t like men who bruised and battered her girls, lowering their chances of making a profit, and the mustache man was good muscle.)

He crosses the room in three strides, a seemingly impossible feat. The blade isn’t cold at all but hot and sticky from the fruit flesh. Clementine pushes her fingers at his face, trying to get at his eyes, but he’s larger today – somehow – and it isn’t fair. She’s got thighs but they don’t help now, and he seems to have eighteen hands, shoving and groping and pulling. She gets a flood of memories the opium usually keeps at bay and chokes a little on her fear.

At the time, his breath stank of gin and potatoes. Not like the orange, because he never did eat it, but the smell of one now makes her face hurt.



It takes her a month to heal decent, but the scar isn’t clean or little. It’s pink and angry and glares against her skin until she feels like discarded meat from the butcher. Another girl, she tells her that she’s lucky – he could have taken the eye or shredded her mouth. Nobody would pay for a girl like that.

Her amount of regulars decline anyway. She spends more money in the Chinese dens, and if the women hadn’t looked at her before they certainly don’t know.

“Independence.” She reminds herself, adjusting the fall of her hair to the left side of her face.



There’s a woman that passes the saloon daily. Clementine notices her after she’s been working for a while, a year or two after the incident. She has hair in a strict bun, hard to see, but Clementine thinks her own has more red. Less golden-copper. She has books with her, papers, and the young boys Clementine sometimes teases will occasionally tip their hats to the woman.

Nobody knows much about her when, out of boredom or curiosity, Clementine asks. The Madame tells her that she’s the new schoolteacher for the town and wags a thick finger at a tall sun-weathered man near the stairs. “Her husband.” She accompanies the declaration with a nudge to her side, and Clementine feels it like a sharpness under her ribs.