More Shamus
This is a first draft of the next part of the Shamus story. I'm not very happy with it.
A coagulate of dust marks the road to judgment, and Shamus walks knowing the task assigned to him. His right hand is stained with the boy’s lifeblood; the hairs on his knuckles are matted and wiry, rust-colored clots cake his fingernails. Meaningless, he thnks, a death spawned ex nihilo in a carnivalesque nightmare with no ringleader and no audience.
Signs point the way: the tracks and droppings of horses; chewed cigar ends; empty and shattered bottles; ejected rifle shells; the body of a girl used for sport, naked and pale, with a bruised handprint on her throat; bone haunches still strung with gobs of meat; human excrement and discarded laughter.
As he walks a town rises before him. It’s a trading post, a town of wood and tin and leather. Its buildings crowd around a single thoroughfare, and signs written in dripping paint signify boarding houses, saloons, bordellos, opium dens--havens for souls atrophied and aimless. Havens for those who would kill a family and leave a girl raped and strangled in the desert.
Shamus stares dusty street, his fingers caressing the hilts of his guns, and he spits with distaste. The town disgusts him, the ugly sculpture marring the sterile desert landscape, a rancid boil that needs lancing. His eyes fill with godwrath, crackling in the desert air. His eyes are drawn to a saloon bearing a sign advertising tinctures of wormwood and laudanum, in front of which stand several horses standing winded and frothing, their tails whipping back and forth. Scalps hang from the saddles, drifting lazily in the wind and dripping blood on the sand. Shamus draws his pistols, and enters the vomit-coated warrens like a wraith, black-cloaked and sudden.
He laughs, possessed with the madness of destruction.
Men are sitting on stools and benches, their hands holding cards or dice, and they react too slowly, stumbling backwards and falling over, their hands drawing pistols and daggers, those without weapons breaking bottles and hoisting chairs to use as bludgeons, all of them shouting through beards flecked with spittle and grease.
Their actions are fruitless; this is a game they cannot win.
A coagulate of dust marks the road to judgment, and Shamus walks knowing the task assigned to him. His right hand is stained with the boy’s lifeblood; the hairs on his knuckles are matted and wiry, rust-colored clots cake his fingernails. Meaningless, he thnks, a death spawned ex nihilo in a carnivalesque nightmare with no ringleader and no audience.
Signs point the way: the tracks and droppings of horses; chewed cigar ends; empty and shattered bottles; ejected rifle shells; the body of a girl used for sport, naked and pale, with a bruised handprint on her throat; bone haunches still strung with gobs of meat; human excrement and discarded laughter.
As he walks a town rises before him. It’s a trading post, a town of wood and tin and leather. Its buildings crowd around a single thoroughfare, and signs written in dripping paint signify boarding houses, saloons, bordellos, opium dens--havens for souls atrophied and aimless. Havens for those who would kill a family and leave a girl raped and strangled in the desert.
Shamus stares dusty street, his fingers caressing the hilts of his guns, and he spits with distaste. The town disgusts him, the ugly sculpture marring the sterile desert landscape, a rancid boil that needs lancing. His eyes fill with godwrath, crackling in the desert air. His eyes are drawn to a saloon bearing a sign advertising tinctures of wormwood and laudanum, in front of which stand several horses standing winded and frothing, their tails whipping back and forth. Scalps hang from the saddles, drifting lazily in the wind and dripping blood on the sand. Shamus draws his pistols, and enters the vomit-coated warrens like a wraith, black-cloaked and sudden.
He laughs, possessed with the madness of destruction.
Men are sitting on stools and benches, their hands holding cards or dice, and they react too slowly, stumbling backwards and falling over, their hands drawing pistols and daggers, those without weapons breaking bottles and hoisting chairs to use as bludgeons, all of them shouting through beards flecked with spittle and grease.
Their actions are fruitless; this is a game they cannot win.
posted by David at 8:15 PM
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