Right, we have Dan Mader's flash fiction Friday thing once again. To be honest, I'm trying to keep up while catching some intense Stanley Cup playoff hockey. No Canadian teams left, but it's hard for me to let go, nonetheless. It's okay, it's all good, worry not.
But yeah, I've been reading plenty of stuff this week about misogyny and rape culture and male privilege and domestic violence. I have some personal familiarity with some of that shit, truth be told, as much as I wish it weren't so (not as perpetrator, before you ask, and for that you must take my word). It's ugly, basically.
Anyway, try to imagine Thelma and Louise with a Cormac McCarthy screenplay, and this latest piece might come clear after a night under some burning starfield, the air having cooled fast, as deserts do.
The thing is, what's important is that writers keep writing, keep improving and entering, displaying their work in places that are both supportive of all-comers yet exacting in terms of standards. We can raise ourselves by our bootstraps, brothers and sisters, no lie.
But yeah. Okay, here it is: my flawed cowgirls get the goddamned blues. Life is messy, yo.
Prayer for the Cowgirls
They tied their mounts in a meager stand of red birch, evening's onset drawing out shadows beneath the vast western cliff face.
To their right, the eastern plains were already dark as an indrawn breath.
Blanket folded between her dusky head and a small rock, Ashlyn lay back and tried to guess where in the sky each new star would choose to glimmer.
Glimmer-born, she thought. A fine name for high fantasy.
But here was only low reality—the edifice that loomed to their left, the quiet trees still as quills, and the memories of their belligerent, cheating, freshly killed husbands still bleeding out on worn linoleum.
What indignities this land has witnessed and then always covered like someone dutiful raking their trail with cedar boughs. Build a fire and not all ghosts scatter.
"Well. We did it." Clara's face indistinct amid the greying of the world.
Another star awoke, and Ashlyn smiled. "Sure did, sis. Turned them tables good."
The horses chuffed and nickered amid the birch stand. Small birds in the scrub chittered and flit, settling.
"So, head out before sunrise?" asked Emilia. "Keep going?"
"I say yeah. Too tired to move, but giving y'all high-fives in my mind here. Night, girls."
"Night."
"Night."
High on the cliff above them a cougar screamed like a child lost in a charnel house, while everyplace else shrank into silence and the stars blazed from their impossible distances, as they always will do and always have done. Amen.