you're too young & eager to love

Trying out a newbie! Welcome, Calder, you silver fox.







I sink the boat of love, but that comes
later. And yes, I swallow
glass, but that comes later.
- Richard Siken




YOU STILL see your wife’s face after all these years.

It comes to you at odd times – when you’re scrubbing a cast iron skillet after breakfast, after you splash cold water on your face in the midafternoon heat, when you kick sand into the fire-pit before bed out on the desert – and you see her as clearly as if she were still slipping into the back room at Mick’s bar, her feet bare, her smile wide, hardly a day over twenty. She had a girl’s face, still round with youth, and a dusting of freckles across her nose that made you think of constellations in the night sky.

(She was younger than you; everything about her body proved it. You had a scratch of beard across your jaw when you met and a moral code that could only be classified as grey. You’d wanted her immediately, her face a sunflower between your palms.)

Sometimes you mourn the gaps in your memory. You can’t recall her voice (was it soft, melodious, or raspy, full of need?) or how she smelled, so you cling harder to what you can remember: copper eyelashes, the slight gap between her front teeth, the mole inside the shell of her ear. It’s the details that are precious. It’s the details you try to memorize.

You want to pay homage, but you want your guilt too.




YOU ACCEPTED the blame for her death long ago. Looking back, you’re almost grateful for it (the catalyst that is your cataclysm). Her death made you rootless, sent you crawling from backstreet gutters to mild, open planes, over sandy dunes and across mountainous cliffs. A misplaced soul. A rover. You needed a reason to change, and you were always the type of man to seize an opportunity (you know that’s how it all started – you see the irony).

Your grief was a stone in your chest, weighing you down. It threatened to suffocate you while you slept. You would wake, wide-eyed and clutching at the air, her name like a plea in your mouth. Drinking helped, but not enough. So you turned to the desert like a madman and used the elements as a test. If you could survive the land, you could survive your sorrow.

It took six months before you realized that you liked being unmoored. You liked trading the mud and blood on your hands for more honest callouses and the ache of a hard day’s work. Your body, as in approval, responded well to your new way of living; your face weathered the changes; your skin darkened; you lost your laugh lines.

You lost much.




IT TOOK three years before you decided to return to society. As far as you could surmise, not much had changed. It was still full of hatred, greed, spite. You remember having to look just as hard as before for anything good.

You’d gone to Palmer because he was familiar. You’d gone to Palmer because there was no one else.

“Calder! How’s your temper?” he asked as an ice-breaker, as unshakeable as you remembered him being. He watched you take off your coat and signaled to the bartender for another beer. “I just want to know if I should expect to get my ass kicked before the night ends.”

He passed you the beer, and you took a drink before answering. “Not your fault. What happened.”

When Palmer grinned, it was sly, foxlike, an expression you never cared for. But you sat with him anyway, drinking slower than you had in years, and surprising yourself when laughter escaped your throat from time to time. The bar felt comfortable. The din of other nearby conversations was not as grating as you had remembered it being. Even Palmer’s smugness didn’t bother you or the carefree manner he had of discussing the past.

It was Palmer that told you about the Range, the old Mistwood ranch a handful of miles out past the western ridge. Palmer had been scouting for land in your absence, on the hunt for a business opportunity, but he handed over the news as a favor.

“I owe you,” he’d said, and for once there hadn’t been a hint of humor in his voice. His face had been a closed door.




YOUR WIFE’S death taught you what happens after love.

You don’t want to forget the lesson.

You bought the Range.




THE RANCH is small, but it’s still hard work for one man. You start slowly and spend long hours making lists of repairs and materials needed. You start with the main house, mending the weak spots in the roof, digging a second well, stocking the pantry with canned goods, dried spices, and cured meats. You have to fix multiple posts in the fence running the length of the property. The best news you hope for is that patches of the land are still viable. You settle for a stretch of pasture hardly larger than an acre.

You start a garden out of necessity. You raise sheep for the company. You have three horses, one little more than a pony, and an old cow that still stands for her milking.

You can’t go much further west. There’s drifter towns to the south, desert to the east, and unexplored areas to your north. You don’t get many visitors. The western ridge is difficult terrain for the unfamiliar traveler, and the ridge hides your valley well. Even the headhunters stay away, preferring desert heat to untrustworthy, treacherous rock. Rumors suggest tribes of beasts occupy the area, migrant clans that roam the lands, laying waste to human allies and Compound sympathizers. Palmer doesn’t give the idea much stock, but you’re grateful for whatever reasons may support your isolation.

You’re on the periphery.





YOU AREN’T searching.

But he comes to you anyway. He arrives at the change of the seasons when the nights are a little calmer, the wind a little madder. He arrives during the month you’ve been dreaming of sharks and the coastal waters of your childhood.

You find him half-alive and feral in the barn, scaring your favorite mare with all the noise he’s making. It takes you less than a minute to realize he isn’t an immediate threat, not in his current condition, but you’re more cautious these days. He’s talking nonsense, his eyes mostly closed, clawing the far corner of your mare’s stall. There’s the smell of sickness about him and something else, something chemical, something synthetic. You open the stall door slowly, coaxing the horse into your steady hands, and out into the yard. When you return to the barn, you have a shotgun in one hand and a medicine kit in the other.

He’s passed out. You’re grateful, but you still keep the gun in reach.

There’s more blood than you were expecting. You have to go back to the house for hot water and clean bandages.

Later, you’ll find blood under your nails even after you’ve washed your hands. You’ll chew on the side of your thumb and taste copper.

You’ll see your wife’s face again.