you're too young & eager to love

My contacts are bugging me.

That somehow excuses me from having to write any introduction/explanation for these bits.

-



Jacob comes into the saloon with cash in his pockets, and the girls bound on his heels like lost dogs. Clementine can see their tails wagging like flags in the night, their noses lifted to sniff his hands. But he’s tall as a tree and handsome and, more importantly, they’re family so she’ll smile from across the faro tables. It won’t mean much, though, and she doesn’t actually wonder about him until he approaches. Slow, steady, a familiar dark glint in his eye.

Clementine places a red curl behind her ear, kisses his cheek, and thinks she can smell rum on his breath. Not an uncommon trait around here, especially given the late hour.

“’ere was a snake in my room today.” She tells him as they climb the stairs, the sounds of rutting louder on the second floor. “I think Samuel would have a bunch to say ‘bout that.”

Jacob grunts, kicking her door in grandiosely and with no obvious respect for anything that isn’t his. “Samuel doesn’t have shit to say about anything.”

Clementine thinks this means his cough has gotten worse, but she keeps quiet, keeps her iron in her spine.

Jacob has slithering eyes and sly, white teeth. He looks at her, sometimes, as though he’s curious. And she doesn’t understand that one bit, seeing as he’s known every part of her. She gets it in her mind to take him to the butcher, bleed him out and bone him, but then she’d be stuck taking care of Samuel. (She doesn’t have the heart or the energy or the patience.)

When he drives into her, Clementine remains silent. She is wary of the creaking bedsprings, the creaking floorboards, their own creaking bones.

Notes: This gets a little vulgar. Tastefully vulgar? If that’s possible. How about – slightly vulgar but with a point. I’m trying to create Clementine into a woman that is, understandably, lackadaisical with sex due to her profession. Yet - I want her to appreciate the more dignified clients, like Peter, and come to value those types of clients for various reasons. However, Clementine’s past is full of skeletons and difficulties, most of them centering around her father in deep-dark ways, so she’s better suited for the rough men. I also don’t think it’s much of a stretch for her to enjoy that type, as much as she hates them, because it’s more of what she’s used to. Or, in the most basic of ways, it’s what her body is used to.

So, this piece is mostly sex. With character insight, but still.

It’s potentially not even a piece, but a few random moments.


(  ...  )

I'm not sure if this is necessarily a piece, per say, or just a bunch of stand-alone bits. It almost runs together when read as a whole, so maybe it can be a disconnected piece? My tenses also jump around like crazy, fair warning.

Side Note: In my attempt to get into the Western mindset, my limited supply of applicable movies just make me sad. The Assassination of Jesse James - sad. Cold Mountain - sad. Tombstone, which I am waiting to watch with my clever wife, is also sad. At least, I think Doc's death scene is sad.

--


Everything is in discord, harsh, and jangling. Her stomach is very empty.

There is no scar (vainly, Clementine is thankful – she couldn’t bear another one) but she remembers gloved hands and so much blood. Tastes copper in the back of her throat.

When she can, she purchases a supply with a long-stemmed pipe, and she smokes until her eyelids are too heavy to keep open.



Sometimes, soldiers amble into town. One tips his hat to Clementine from the street, grins and drawls out a “How d’ya do, Ma’am?”

She laughs like a stork.



If Peter belonged to anybody, surely it was his wife. He was not the type of man to remove his wedding ring, and Clementine was accustomed to a clientele of husbands. But she liked him in the soft, simple way she liked a cool drink on a warm day. He was consistent and clean, attractive with his calloused hands smelling of the hunt, and he would hold her face while she braced herself above him.

Broad and gilded beneath the sun, he was not what she was used to. He spoke and drank little but, sometimes, there was an urgency to his actions. A heavy hold on her hips and a strangled, husky cry from a seldom-used throat. He would linger then, palms on the sides of her stomach, like he was waiting for something to happen.

She’d swipe a hand across his forehand and say, “Sugar – this ain’t ever gonna be what you need.”

Most times, he’d kiss her scarred cheek goodbye.



“Falsehood ain’t blotted away, no matter how much incentive.” She says this after three quick shots, the whiskey a burning spreading from her chest. Careful to smoke her cigarettes by the open window, Peter she lets stay a while - even though he’s charged less due to the frequency of his visits. While he doesn’t lower his eyes, Clementine thinks he knows what she means.



She throws herself onto her singular chair, all arms and ripped stockings and laughter. It’s the opium again; she still smells of the den, but Peter’s disapproval is something she does not notice. It is of no concern to her, and she is too forward sometimes, her fingers in his hair, twisting his beard fondly, or whispering into his ear words that make his strong chest flush.

He is a good man, better than the most that frequent the saloon, and he can’t help but object of his own actions. After all, his honor was Hannah’s honor. But she would bite her tongue, and Peter would keep his habits.



“Have you had many of those cowboys? Or squaws?” This, Clementine thinks, is Peter’s only chance at cruelty. She wonders if it comes around whenever his wife’s monthlies do, spurred on by some bitter disappointment.

Sucking air through her teeth, she twists the ends of her rusty hair around her fingers. “I don’t put much stock in the opinion of others, Peter. You know that.” She rubs her hip, adjusts the garter that’s gripping her thigh like a noose. “It ain’t gonna matter to you, anyways. A quim’s a quim.”

Peter’s jaw tightens. “Must you talk like that?”

“How would you have me talk?”

The Indians, like the Chinese, don’t bother her. But they tend to stray from the town, unwelcomed by the ignorant cowboys. Little piss ants, the lot of them, walking around with their chests puffed up like roosters strutting through a barnyard. They pay though, that’s what matters – silver and gold coins, paper bills that they like to shove against her skin, like they’re doing her a favor after she’s done all the work. A tip, they call it. “You planning on asking me if I’ve had that Jesse James guy too? Or Doc Holiday?”

Peter laughs, a sound more infrequent than any other. It makes her raise an eyebrow, turning. “Well now, I reckon that noise warrants a reward of some sort.”

And, for the second time of the day, she crawls over him.



“You are glowering, Peter.” Hannah’s voice is soft but not meek. She speaks slowly over dinner, the first words of the evening.

He stirs, an action displayed only by the cut of metal across the plate. “I am thinking, there is a difference.”



There’s women hanging from the windows, naked arms and dark eyes. Loud, braying laughter – the type tainted by too much alcohol. And at this early an hour? Hannah pushes her school supplies closer to her chest, like a barrier, and sweeps her eyes across the street. Some of her male students are close to the saloon, whistling like wolves between their teeth. She has a desire to shelter them, to usher them away from a world they are all too quick to enter.

She’s paused too long, and someone hits her shoulder. Startles her. She gets a glimpse of very red hair, long and full, on a face that’s pretty in an unusual way. Weak about the chin, and then Hannah sees the scar. She stares, unintentionally really, because her father brought her up good and proper, while the woman purses her mouth. “You studying me enough to do an impersonation, sugar?”

Hannah flushes, stumbles over what she intends to be a well-mannered apology, but the other’s already moved on. Saunters into the saloon with her hips rolling beneath her skirts, pausing once only to pat a student’s shoulder affectionately.

It isn’t until after she’s left, disappeared behind swinging doors, that Hannah thinks she recognizes a smell. Something staunch like vinegar.

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

--



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.