* / no surprises.

Her heels dug into the firm ground beneath, anchoring her in place and distracting the urge to skitter elsewhere, forget this half-hearted investigative effort entirely. She felt like a ghostly apparition herself, hanging by the sidelines yet tethered to earth by all still unfinished. The blanketing boundaries of silent lulls were merciful, made it almost tolerable. Roux: a frog in tepid water awaiting for an imperceptible inferno to swallow her whole. Oh, to be so lucky. A better fate than having to express any hint of heartache on her quest for an antidote. To be forthcoming was exhausting. Honesty was a curse she’d enjoy sooner swallowing the poisonous affliction of than offer like honey, slow and sickly concentrated. It was only Jude’s choice words which kept the faucet turned, open and slowly thawing. Too: a solidified fact, however their specific manifestations differed, her sufferings were not bestowed in solitary. “Mhm,” she murmured, “violence, with a vengeance, and poetry... weirdly. That's new. The bloodbaths are usually fine—” a word generously used in lieu of typical; not desirable, but a common thread in the natural order of every night, just as the moon's rise and fall, “—but it’s not like…” Roux’s fingers twitched at her sides, lacking the eloquence to describe the sensory imprints dredged from a reanimated past nor sensitive enough to deliver any heartfelt admission. Instead, she begrudgingly rolled up one of her coat sleeves to submit the angered skin beneath, mauve and plums swirling like overcast clouds in neatly portioned cuffs. The uncompromising grip of much larger hands or shackles; chaffing friction beneath a vice grip. Up for interpretation. Allowing only her forearm a taste of the cold air, the gist of it was enough to imply what remained hidden snugly beneath further layers. “The pain's not staying up here,” she concluded, as she worked the fabric back into place, raising a hand to roughly tap at her temple for emphasis. The intellectual projections were a cause of another unique form of pain. I grow until the day I die. “And I sure don’t fucking think in poems. You get any of those, too?" You’ve seen me once, "They're like lyrics, but not from any real song or jingle…”  If you don’t see me now you won’t survive. Frustration fissured the cracks of her composure, despising having to acknowledge the onslaught of it to move through the excruciation. Was that the surprise? The point of the town’s taunting and face borrowing monstrosities — to occupy an unfulfilling life until it became better, then suffer any remnants of satisfaction torn off the bone. God, she hated to contemplate. Hated the world for making her do it with a witness. “Every time I wake up, it’s all that’s stuck in my head. The same bullshit lines. I don’t want them, I don't know them, but They want me to.” 

The animals would always survive, no doubt, an ability to live that the rest of Arcadia did not possess. If they lingered here, in this winter, Jude would not question it. Their hunger unmet, the ground not thawed—beyond home laid only brutality. She had starved herself too. Affection and heat. Arms she could fall into, carefully, fully—only her home did not stand the same. It had been swallowed, spat out. Its fragility a warning. Nothing grew or stayed. A being formed in such frost, she shrank now. 

Spine snapped with stuttered movement, muscles pushed to bone—the shift between brief pause and a return to the work. Not with self-consciousness but uncertainty. The rancher was accustomed to being unnoticed, unwatched. No accidents. Labour like taken breath, heaved with fog. Jude had covered herself, hidden away. Only neck bare, inched out of a jumper she had given enough times to another. The only ardency afforded was just a small lingering of her lover. Her spare room now full, the visitors less unexpected if often ungreeted. Days of limbo with ears strained for the gaps between steadied breath, the soft cries above wooden still. Hovered, stuck and pointless. Sleep long used to avoid question, invaded again and again. The restlessness evident in the heavy eyes, a throat dry with scathe but robbed of humour. 

Jude moved with no regard, the work that she knew too well, but had no verve for in such a vicious sunrise. It had been summer the first time. Earth sunbaked and broken, mud cracked and jutted with grass. The windmills and slaughterhouses where the beginnings of nothing noted were made. Small still, but formed by the inevitable, a destiny long before it had ever been considered. A vocation of such demand, sweat, with no further consideration for oneself. Long enough ago, even longer it seemed now that warmth had been robbed from them all. The seasons here only light before, some mimicked heat or wind, too far now to be remembered, extinguished life in the days between. Every exhale sighted, misted in air with an accompanying stab to the lungs. Life, still, in the deadly air. 

The scars revealed, she stilled, forgot the work that had called her out. The diversion. Gazed, steady and heard the pause of her own blink. Not alone then, in the haunting, a torture shared. A person with years that mirrored her own, even if it had never given too much closeness. Another trick or torture, as if the place had not taken enough. Always hungry for more. Kept away by closed door and heart. Her own concealed hurt pulsed, remained hidden. The truth was not something that departed Jude readily. The secret may be kept, regardless, another thing kept in shadow. “Or riddles?” One answer at last, perhaps, the reason that Roux had been at the doorway. Something offered with enough of an admission attached. The indignation. Immediately scoffed at, eyes rolled on reflex—the audaciousness of a returned ghost that knew her only as a stranger. Demanded now to be looked at, heard. The grip only tightened when turned from, every cut and bruise remaining until morning—every dreaded daybreak since. “Makes you miss when death seemed so—” The hospitals and still rooms with silence that swallowed her whole. Too young to do anything. An aloneness in the world never quite confirmed but felt all the same. A tree twisted before her truck window, the dirt she had crawled from. Dead long enough. “Permanent.” The wind against the metal gate of the barn, high-pitched—sharp as it rung out in her ear. Static. There had to be an end. "So how does it stop?"

Jude rolled her shoulder, did not produce the smirk that would have come with the ease of such a setup.  “Your family, you should know.” The work had been abandoned, adorned now with marks of a distracted effort. The dull hum of her unsatisfied mind. “Last week obviously. The clinic was just stacked with them.” Released dry and cold, warmth would not be dragged out into the air from such a skeleton. No ease to be pulled from such a being, unsocialised still. “They are if you play with them.” The fingers stretched, twitched in the cold—some small spot of red produced, again entreating to be acknowledged. Felt. Flicked away again, the response to blood and offering only a short laugh. “You’re alright, kid, wouldn’t want you over excited so close to your bedtime.” 

Tongue released with a click, a head half cocked as if the surrondings could be ever possibly be omitted. “Insane?” Some word, barren of much meaning now. Maybe a number of years ago, to someone else—when humanity meant something, even if only watched from the outside. Their survival left little for sense. The years were a cycle of waiting, observing as others gave up or in. “And you find yourself prone to sanity here?” The train wouldn’t arrive, they would never leave. One way out and its teeth always always so near, days etched out in Their shadows. 

a nod. "four girls." rylee's eyes strayed from the other. just briefly. knowing that the knowledge of her having children in a place like such always came paired with pity. with a heavy heart. condolences. the toe of her shoe lightly kicked some of the melting snow. it slushed to the side giving her a momentary distraction. arcadia would be more digestible if rylee had been here alone. her husband, dear friend, and daughters kept safe on the outside. free. "all here." the bitterness of the cold was warm in comparison to the bitterness the town had been. a town of such cruelty. unapologetic. "could say so." the woman's chin turned back toward jude. there wasn't a need to push any pleasantries. no squeezing out any lasting energy to provide a sunny disposition. the car graveyard allowed the woman to reveal a demeanor that had been hidden during most hours of the day. kept secret from the hope filled daughters. "really, a place to cry." rylee laughed as the truth unveiled itself.

A twitched mouth, contorted shortly, but with no parted condolence: family, people who arrived here not alone but with a stretched hand that met with another. Hell shared. It was with some small relief that Jude had remained as she had lived. Alone. Brought into being by something now only a fractured memory, the closest thing to family some black-eyed trust between children with names that had been forgotten. Always brief, facile. Care was only torturous, clutched to here when creature lingered in every shadow. The end of each of them loomed. For the first time, she had only dipped into the shallow of a heart, found it already so ruinous. It could only ache more to feel, she would not confirm it. “You need somewhere away from them to cry.” Jude nodded, did not raise it as question, the lull of her voice swallowed by the emptiness of what lay to rot. Further solitude still sought out even in the vacuum of her own life, to think in the still where the frost had not yet met the sky. “Four does sound like four kids too many.”  

There is a number shouldering one and two.     Crowded but clean,   like teeth pearling down the thumb bone.     A carnal imitation of a clear length.     Without a decimal,   or a steady line,   or even a proper angle.     But there,   it mounds a blunt steeple,   spliced out of the rigid air that couples a comma,   not a final period.     Liminal.     Bordered,   but just barely.     Sea-glass.     The glossy film of a salty tear.     This is where she resides:   at the round of said comma,   at the cliff-edge dropping your gaze to the vast pledge of nothing.     Precipice,   spill,   collision.     You almost know her,   in the milk-teeth way you knew your brother.     Hot as the womb,   in life and in death.     A horizon of disaster.     She is a blanched thicket of reprise curbed within summary.     Waylaid by wash and skinning boil.     It balances his look and his feel:   the urge and the incumbent intimacy.     To deter a frustrated pull on a thumb nail-bed.     As the driftless gaze says   —   drawn to the honey-smoked scent of want   —   you will be known.     Brown traces blue.     Shadowed plume and forked light.     Gaunt   /   Fenced.     Come closer.     Appetites will heal.

And none to condemn them into such a knife-shape.

Mouth jerked like a shiver, not a smile but a curve faint and unkind. No desire to learn what Nick had come for at all. Curiosity in Jude was frequent and continually treacherous but did not arrive much for people. The answers too limited, blatant. Even if he blurred. “Looks like loneliness is a luxury I can’t afford.” Only one visitor yearned for, kept for moments. Never with any hope. Never did she cling to something as breakable as it. Waited for each time still, with a breath held and doubtful. The return only ever dream. Something whole for a desolate doorway. Not the formation ahead now, more shadow and less slight. Solid and stout against barred sun. Acceptable to the rancher if only in the silence disseminated. No anticipation for civility. Left here, alone here. Creaked and weathered as the wood, only pestered by presence needless. Their noise persistent, a knife through the soft bleat of animal throat. An anthem of the less maladjusted who arrived for nourishment or worse, unwanted assistance. No such question or demand for her in this moment. Shrunk back into the gap of squandered days. “You still a lonely boy with all those housemates of yours?” She imagined it must be a cosy existence at the common house, wedged together in their numbered years, survival pressed against each other. What noise, being watched and watching. She would make the choice to be alone again and again—even if it had never been much of one. Slip away unnoticed for good one day.

Fingers dug into the temple as anything would ease. The headache lifelong and static. Long held by spine alone, extended still as if some invasion had been spoken of in the dark. Sigh rather than answer granted.

There was a lot that she wanted to say to Jude, uncertain and bitter on her tongue but she found she could not form the words. Something tugged them back from the inside, pulling them close to her corroded heart where they would tattoo themselves in defiance of being denied. In truth, she did not know what Conor would have wanted. She had barely known him when she had requested his help and sealed his fate forever. He had had no burial, she hadn't even been able to find his corpse again. Sometimes late at night she wondered if that was why he was haunting her. Had he wanted his death to mean something? Could he have known when he shoved her back to sacrifice himself that he would endure in the depth of her misery, embalmed there until Charlie took her final breath and joined him? In his ghostly and ghastly presence she found herself to afraid to ask.

Did Jude have regrets? The rancher had always been entwined with solidarity. Prior to today, Charlie hadn't really had the chance to speak with Jude or get to know them. There was respect there, to be sure, but now sitting across from her she realized that there was nothing separating them in this reality, that they were both lonely people that sought solace from it in different ways. Charlie wondered if Jude hurt just as deeply as she did. This was not something she wanted the answer to. She could not let herself stew in the misery of others, could not afford to care and lose again. First Conor, then Shaw, and Jude (so much like her in her hurt) that death, in its inevitability, would be fashioned from her own hands in due time; when the days were a little too dark and the nights a little too long. The strings of fate were like that: fragile enough to be cut by a tree, but strong enough to hang yourself from when the time was right.

Rest. It mauled at her in the ache of her bones, despairing that it may never be felt again. Sleep rarely brought it. Even there she was tightly wound. Alcohol, while great at releasing the tension, did little to alleviate its cause. She nodded at Jude, hearing her words even if they would not sink into her hardened skin. She took a second to compose herself, to wipe at her face and flatten her hair with her palms, ignoring the tug of pain it brought to her severed pinkie. "I'm trying, you know? I'll keep trying." It was only half a lie. She would try to try and for now that had to be enough. Charlie averted her gaze to look outside. It was a poorly constructed excuse but there was a heat of shame igniting at the openness she had shown with Jude. Charlie stood from the chair. "I should head back before it's dark out." Hands shoved in her pocket Charlie looked at Jude, paused, and then added, "thanks for this and um..." A nod in Shaw's general direction. "They'll be fine. I'll come back tomorrow afternoon, I think you'll need a bit more than two hands for this rubble. See you then, Jude."

Jude cleared her throat, rose from her chair with a half-stumble masked by a steadied foot. “Sure.” She did not often misstep, steady and stern in her gnarled stature. Unchanged, only blurred, perhaps, unsure of herself infrequently. A figure busied by the work of her hands, of a clutch around some distilled perdition. Braced by such occupations. The ritual of denying any help did not arrive; her own time dashed and the other undoubtedly in need of some purpose. Caught now, a confidant without any dexterity. She folded her elbows, dug fingers into into muscle hard and racked. Always resisting. “Look after yourself, Clayton.” Something more not said. Think about it. Charlie was kept there, for a moment, a picture to be stowed away. So young, so exhausted. Devoured by wound. Youthful still with the days that had been taken, snatched away—ancient in the mourning, the time that went on and on. A sight that went marked until the rancher had to look away, disregard the lurch inside. There was no real use in her for such sensation. No great capacity, only something small and fractured—desperately suffocated.  

The ranch shuddered with doors that opened and closed. Once only silence filled, it groaned and creaked with complaint for the racket of procured lives. Still again. Faintest visitor lost, back out in the dirt and bluster. The table soon left abandoned with bowls dumped in the sink, disregarded in simple strides. Scrubbed at with hands ran under the cold, scoured until blood was drawn from knuckles. Skin strained and worn, shallowed with tendons and blue veins that angered. There was little that ever went to waste, even as hunger was kept as faintly as anything else. Strayed in the drain now. Jude sighed into the air with a stab of unsated need. The water ran still, forgotten as it stung and froze. Flexed out her stiff fingers. Turned off, the ranch groaned again. Time slipped on with a cruelty.

No other pursuit found, Jude stopped by the door opened only a crack, left in place to always be within hearing distance. Her days now drawn by the single glow of orange kept in cold days, a fraction only slight in the grey. The fire had remained constant in its burn. She had made sure. Breath held every time. They’ll be fine. Shaw didn’t stir. She could be thankful for that, at least. To have been disturbed by no more, touched by nothing else. The bedside still scattered with the tokens to supersede words that had gone unformed. Tomorrow they would try again.

Regardless, the only spectre from the past that was influencing him was his mother - but upon reflection, he didn’t think it was. His mother, to all her faults, was a notoriously health conscious woman, and he didn’t think her ghost would spend the time bothering him when there were bigger and brighter places to go. Clearly she was alive still, and there was something about this vision he’d see that, while a near perfect replica, lacked something behind the eyes. In his dreams, the two of them didn’t look at each other too often - it sometimes felt like he was seeing her on a delay, like watching a flipbook instead of chatting with his mother, her voice meanwhile piercing right through his skull. 

Chase was spurned out of his thoughts when Jude spoke again, giving her his attention, hands in his pockets and leaning against the car behind him, not on the move to ditch so much anymore. “Sometimes, I guess,” he shrugged. “I’ve gotten pretty adept at tuning her out over the years.” Both of his parents, in his defense. Everyone, really. “She keeps talking in like, a riddle. She doesn’t usually do that, that’s pretty out of the ordinary.” He cleared his throat, as if prepping for some sort of Shakespearean monologue. “I grow until the day I die. You’ve seen me once, if you don’t see me now, you won’t survive. Chilling. Don’t tell me you’re getting the same thing.”

Limp and peaceless. Daylight stretched longer with the turned earth, finally—no alleviation revealed in days extended and lucent. A taunt to something now dead, even if the attempts at thawing had only been idle. Snow that had remained. Too concrete, still, against the dragging. Ground breakable under such weight. Against the earth, the worn boots of the rancher. A path carved out over and over. Steady thump until a stall, compacted ice and dirt tight against the sole then released. In a moment blurred by toil when met with another figure, scarcely disturbance but enough to be stilled. A spine untangled with haste, every inch of height given. An effort never to be towered over. The sigh in aggrieved air long and misted.

or it can be the beer. great as she is with her hands, opening beer bottles is never her best feat, always making a mess with jerky movements and clumsy grips. the great ashley dickens, best butcher in town, defeated by a bottle with a vengeful, tight cap — the very reason why she keeps jude around.

the past year has found her sober — of beer, that is. other than the obvious fact that is a forever-dwindling supply of beer, her friend has found herself a... company, of sorts. it's the type of companionship that even someone as shameless as ash would refuse to subject herself to witness, never mind that it is also the type of companionship she once sort of had with said companion. complicated, messy, but shrugged off in favor of a smooth-sailing existence in an otherwise fucked up town.

"guess what i found, jude." ash's fingers curl tightly around two bottle necks as she approaches with languid steps, her other hand kept snuggly in her pocket. "beer— from, uh, 2006. can you believe that? magic, i tell you. starting to think people at the settlement have a ritual for new supplies or something." she stops beside jude and offers a bottle, leaning against the fence with a simper while digging her thumbnail under her index's, clicking sounds a constant where ash is found. "kinda weird seeing you out and about this time of the day. if you're here to prevent a repeat of last time, rest assured a certain someone's presence here over the past year has barred me from this place— your pigs were definitely happy for it."

There was nothing but violence in the digging. Preservation in such conditions would have to be clawed out, bloodied and dragged out. If Jude did not work it would be more than the earth that starved. Not valiant determination but practicality, it was the very demand that had finally unfolded her limbs. Extracted her from where she may have curled and mourned instead. Alone and unthought of, she would have to remember how it had been before—when all that had been known was toil and ache. 

“Shit, it’s vintage.” A rolled tongue dipped in something light that would not be reflected on the contours of a hardened face. The arrival of company that had been neglected. Not that there had been much given as pledge from Jude who had not known how to make or keep loyalty. The meetings of downed replica umber liquid and slacked conversation unattended all the same. Instead, a hunger so vigorous and over-indulged that the end had left no more than picked clean bones.  Even the distraction had been shirked, taken now without thought as a bottle from Ash’s hands. There was no need to remain in anything longer. 

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dickens.” The lid bitten and spat out with words less coordinated. Jude did not contain a willingness for confession. Everything that she deserted for something concealed, a thing ended without much more utterance. Still kept like it could live. Like it ever could have been saved. “Chemicals got your brain all fucked.” Familiarity made palms itch but spines slant, some contest between defence and understanding. The relent was only slight, a tugged corner of the mouth accompanied by a sharp pull of liquid. A burnt throat. “You better leave my pigs alone, perv.”

"What difference does it make?" she asked, voice wavering and thick. Her lips felt dry. "If it wasn't for me, he would still be here. But it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be." Brows furrowed, she licked her lips. "Do you think we get a choice in how we die?" Only cowards chose to end their own life, but could she, when the time came, travel a path that allowed her to go quietly, gently, held in the warmth of someone she loved? She sighed, the tenseness in her shoulder heavy. Her hand throbbed, a reminder of what it was like when a choice was made, forced by the threads of this place. A humourless smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. It was an impossible ask for Charlie to do anything but give hell back to this place that had molded it from her. At Jude's touch, Charlie met her eyes and promised, "I'll make this place suffer."

She was grateful when the rancher pulled her hand away, felt it did nothing but add to the knot in her throat and the tears streaking down the dirt of her face. It was too late to heed Jude's warning, the giving in committed days ago when the only thing that allowed her to sleep without fearing Reyna coming in or Conor forcing the removal of another digit was the thick heavy feeling of eyelids drooping from excessive alcohol consumption. Is there? She wanted to ask. "What if I already have? I don't know how to... how to stop this otherwise." A gesture towards her head, a quiet admittance of guilt over losing control, of fear driving her every move. "I can't escape myself this place otherwise."

shame. you might be missing out. — there had been a lot rylee had missed out on. thrown to the wind of motherhood. buried beneath a failing marriage. divorce. life just withering away to dust, and yet so much life still left. the woman, petite, carried such might against allowing herself to wallow on what she had missed out upon. no need to pity herself. motherhood had always delighted her to a full extent. no matter the downfall of her marriage. surely, if her mind had leaked into thought.. —particularly at night. laying awake in bed about her persona being swallowed by the lives of her daughters. no room left for her to explore herself intimately — with a partner or alone. those moments of thought would be drowned out by tired, heavy lids. sleep consumption. washed all by morning just to fall back into motherly routine.

It was unduly cold. Bones sharp and contorted with some youthfulness that ought not to be found in something as weathered. Cut against the wind, the metal beneath the thigh almost damp in its sting. It had been terribly mild before. Before this winter that had come only to take. The years before only knew some imitation of weather, seasons had seemed too alive and changeable to be replicated, accepted as another dead thing here. Jude flexed out the hardness settled in her hands, the ice pick against muscles. She thought to leave, return to a hearth still burning—despite, despite—it had been left only for some semblance of her mind to be found. That out in the earth she might find some segment of it left in the dirt between the fields and trees. Now she longed to return to the heat, where she could not quite meet eyes—unfit and always in the wrong place. She shifted and stilled.

Hell. A raised brow, some knowing wilted amusement. Well enough of them called it such before. Hell Town, nowhere, the abyss. Purgatory. It relied on who you asked, on what day. The beings brought here—stuck here—not together but bowed before the same fate. Even those who fell to their knees to beg and scream for salvation, to worship at the base of a tree. The world had chewed and spat, the other side of the grave much colder. Dead things that were supposed to stay buried. Buried things that were supposed to stay dead. The soil rolled off them all, still lose when some life clung to them. Even though Jude took little notice of them, those who came and went, she could tell the new inhabitants by that alone. The clawing at the door between before and now left such marks. 

There was disobedience clawing to challenge Jude on her threat, to say that she would cum harder if the rancher walked away right now, that she had memorized the feel of thick padded finger tips and would imagine her own slender hands to be the other's. That regardless she would leave feeling satisfied and sated. But the words died on the tip of her tongue as Jude manhandled her over a haybale. In truth, Nika had wanted this for a long as they had been acquainted. This is all broken things were good for: a quick and messy fuck. Nika had wanted to feel those hips dig into her backside since the alcoholic farmhand had landed in hell town, stupor drunk most night and ugly in the way people who had lost sight of themselves always were.

Jude's redemption arc had been a pathetic attempt at normalcy, Nika knew neither of them were people deserving of love or of a tender touch. Tenderness was the poison of survival for people who, like them, had clawed their way out of hateful wombs, birthed into a world that would never understand who they were or why they were a collection of puzzle pieces that didn't feel right. Her breath hitched as Jude manipulated the joints of her hips to arch her back, to render her immovable to the wandering hand slipping between her legs. She could feel what Jude would find, resisted the urge to break previous demands of keeping her hand to herself by instead diggings her hands into the haybale. "I don't deserve it," she replied, a moan slipping out as Jude's fingers found their destination. "But I want it anyway." She pivoted her head to look over her shoulder towards Jude to add, "And I'm not above begging for it".

Give but not take. Not with any kindness. There was only service in the giving, not generous but for once to be unburdened with thought. The entrapment that was her own mind. Exchanges between them had been spiked and disparaging. A leader used to some esteem, the faithful at their feet—the untamable rancher who had never given in to authority or belief. Staggered long without scouring for crutch. Their words had only ever been barbarous, an ardour for all things that could be torn apart. 

“No?” A smirk, wicked and toothed. The question was no more than a taunt, the only thing that could be retained. Nika did not deserve it; neither of them did. Even this small sick derision of intimacy. There was no trust. No respect or carefulness. Only the hunger of a starved creature kicked and volatile, teeth bared as the walls closed in. Nothing would be lost or gained—there was nothing that would be theirs. The putrescence was not second skin that could be shed; it was coiled in blood and bone, lodged in a muscle that had long starved.  “Good.” Sated, Jude sank. Into her, into the dirt. A hand tighter still, nimble fingers lost in a hue just like the straw against the other’s curve, where her gaze stayed. It could be fast and strenuous or she could drag it out with more cruelty. The only victory would be in the fatigue that would find her before the regret. “Because you are going to beg.” She pushed at Nika again, at the slope of a delicate neck, to ensure she would not be seen again.

He smirked at her words and then drove his foot into his stirrups to lift himself onto his horse, Titan (aptly named for its size, one of the only horses that could take his weight). "Yessiree ma'am," he said with the downward flick of his cowboy hat. He pulled the reigns with his right hand and drove his horse with a trot towards the gates of the ranch. "'n aah don't know about that. D'ya ever feel lak this place changes? Every time aah head out o-wn the horse it feels lak the land has shifted." It was said over his shoulder, a gruff in his voice in the cold that was seeping through his clothes. He had had some cold rides in Montana, but the cold in Hell Town felt different, like it would etch itself into his bones.

He opened the gate while still on his horse and waited for Jude to come through before he could shut it. "What else ya have o-wn today, boss?"

Out through the gate, the pace as steady as could be bared. Even if an urge for momentum, to run always pulled. There was nowhere to go. Nothing. Jude thought. The days long and unmarked. As dead as she recognised them—touch only a memory. A reconstructed corpse unable to return to itself the same. She rolled her shoulders. “Think we have some calves ready to drop.” Work vigorous and violent, taken to with only some torn quarter of a heart. Kept to, despite, the only thing that she was needed for. 

Jude recoiled with a thought. Inevitably prompted by the ranch hand, as if she had known a single moment without it. It was as if he arrived with it clung to him, the remembering of something loved, not ignored but kept in distance. A hurt coiled into a bed too small. “How—” Shattered, it was nearly lost in a cough, dry and violent as it slipped from her throat. Some unstitched wound, it would not stop exuding. “How are things at the clinic?”

There was so little they could remember of it. Before. The syllables of it had echoed now, in this paltry room lit up by only a bulb, the color of it so sick and yellow. Light left the bruised sky; evening had come. Once, they could imagine how even this little space could be subsumed by the sun through the narrow slope of the window. Of its golden rays that might have glided through what little bridge there was between the wall and their bedroom. The decision to bar it had been made easily when they settled here more than a decade ago. To nail it shut, to board it up, even as their crude handiwork allowed for whatever paltry scants to reach through all the same. In earlier years, they would see Their eyes staring back at their figure through those narrow slats, pointedly and with taunting. The creatures had tried so hard to break them for years, found less resilient figures to tempt in the interim. Shaw had slept facing the wall, keeping themselves prone and curled, their back to the sliver of moonlight. For years, it was the only light they had ever let in. 

That had been before. Before they’d become swallowed by Jude and her river-like eyes, incised herself into the tenderest muscle of their being. Hadn’t they learned by now? They could not stand too long in the light, could not make use of it, could not—

We’re just two people fucking each other. 

Left airless in the whiplash, Shaw adjusted their grip over the crutch to stop themselves from falling but the jolt sent a surge of pain regardless, the teeth grinding against each other to keep from crying. The source of the pain now two-fold. Their mouth parted just as a tear fell. The attempt at a goodbye might have been initiated by Shaw’s tongue but it would be Jude’s words that would deliver the mortal wound.

“Is that what you think?” Their heart lurched at the thought. “That we’re just fucking?” 

The word fell from their mouth only to gut them entirely. Shaw had asked for the truth. Perhaps it was this. “That’s how you see me now, isn’t it.” The hand covering the small of her back fell at their side, clenching itself into a fist, nails that grew over the past week forming tiny crescents against their palm. “No use fighting for me now that you can’t fuck me.”

An accusation. The real sentiment of the words drowned in the depth of their hurt. How easily it could be dismissed as a lie—the year they’d spent surely brimming with evidence against it. Of stolen time in a borrowed ranch, of her time spent inside them growing deeper and longer, of the sky growing bluer and the sky more golden when they finally drew apart. No longer the frantic affairs of hunger satiated but the easy trade of affections in the dark and even at the starkness of the light when there would be no hope of concealment. Just moments earlier: fingers in the small of her back, unable to surrender even the barest hint of touch. 

“Because I don’t think that’s how you see me at all.” 

Only—the doubt lingered. That Shaw had gotten it all wrong. That the five years since they met each other was nothing but a tragic miscalculation, that the affection cobbled together from the beast of their hunger was a lie. So desperate to call someone their own that they had not stopped to think whether it would be reciprocated. The by-product of a doctor’s ill vanity: that they should have mistaken Jude’s touch that was so liberally offered as fact that they were wanted. Loved. How ugly they felt in the clarity of it. Beneath this sorry skin, their blood pulsed. 

I need to go. 

“Jude.” Their voice, quiet, was no more command than a plea. They watched helplessly as they retrieved the stack of documents that had been left in the crutch’s wake. Useless things now. Could not remember what it was meant for, the stacks upon stacks on old yellowing paper in the doctor’s shallow attempts to make sense of the world as it now stood. “Jude.” Their demand echoed, Shaw walked towards the door, legs moving on impulse. Pain, hot and wet, detonated against their immobilized leg, but no matter. They had chased her even now, after the unburdening of truths and the mutual lie and the shared painful goading. Their dress was left unbuttoned. There was no dignity left to be salvaged, nothing Jude had not already seen. Only she had ever seen everything. 

“Don’t go.” They staggered through the doorframe, back against the door. Sank against the familiar press of it to block her exit. The crutch hung loosely at their side, they winced through the pain of holding themselves up and together. The back of their hand left grazed their eyes, smearing it from the tears of burning eyes. “Not when it’s gone dark. Not—” Not with the declaration that they’d hoped was only a lie, “—not like this.” 

The night hungered as Jude became later, too late now. Static as she slipped and despaired. An escape stolen. No knee she could fall to. The tile under her feet was studied again and again. She had only wanted to watch the sunset against Shaw’s skin, imagine the dark as a star-filled sky when caught in the slope of their neck. Known of no thought away from them, to not recognise the truth that had contaminated the veins of their lives but remember it as something else. Tender-hearted. The world only as it existed between them. Even as she waited, observing—for the juncture of evened out breath when Shaw could be safe in rest. A delicate fracture between time almost severed completely and more given. Clung to. Still too guarded to express the depth of her sentiments, nothing left out or spoken of. To pull herself away, then, and await the nightmares alone. It had been a privilege, not hers to hold, to have been touched by them at all. 

That’s how you see me now. Jude did not deny the untruth, so preposterous and yet her own fault. She had no concept of defence. Even as an image of Shaw once carried could not be remade. They could not be cast from her mind. How they had breathed into her open mouth. Waited to be asked to touch, never pushed. Watched her fall apart in the dark, a steady hand against her as she shook. The only one allowed to take and give. It had never been something small or just physical. They had touched her like she was worth anything at all.

“No, no—” It had always been easier. That anyone believed Jude to be cold and unlovable than wounded, that something tender desired under it all. Violently. Everyone waited for it. For her to admit that she had spoken too soon, too bluntly. That what had tripped out of her was merely a symptom of thoughtlessness. 

Jude was only nine, under a grimed window when she knew she would never make it to heaven. A stormy and callow thing that winced under threaded light. The coldness had only ever been a knee-jerk. Decades later, on deathly earth, the only good she had ever known. 

The wounds open and gleamed. Jude wanted to go home. Not that she had ever known where that was. Here, now, a dying thing against the doorframe. Somewhere she was still and shirked, a place they had shared, where she could be comfortable with the way she loved them—away from all others. It could not be done bloodlessly, the first and last time she would fall in such a way. 

“I—” love you and I’m sorry. The words did not come. No faith that they could not leave anything more than ruin. 

God, was Jude sorry.

Tangled against the door. Shaw would have to move or be moved but Jude could not bring herself to make them. Her harm had not been deliberate, her touch light with caution. She would have to beg. She stilled with some perverse thing. To wipe away the tears with her thumb once more. To press her mouth against theirs soundly. To drink. She kept her sight from the wounds she could not heal, a submission only ever so near. 

“It’s easier this way.” Wasn’t it? It had always been easier to leave. Wouldn’t they be happier, safer without her? Shaw’s time here had been long, a stretch of time she could not imagine enduring with such softness. The hardest thing and the necessary thing the same—to walk away now, in love with them.

Tell them. There was an echo of it. A stranger’s ghost or her own heart. Jude shook the confession from her mind. It could not be. 

“Don’t.” A brief hand against Shaw’s shoulder as if it knew any mitigation. An instinct to reach for them. Coiled just as quickly, like it had seared. “Please, just—” Move. It didn’t need to be made any more impossible. Jude had never been able to leave them. Even the first time, she had waited for them without even a small indifference. Where one went, the other seemed to follow. “You need to rest.” She reached between limbs, held them steady and upright as she found the door handle. Too close, a wary press, she did not breathe. 

“You want me to be done.” Jude exhaled like it was only a reminder. “I am.” Away from the room, the door closed as she plunged into the dark alone. The sculptures of an office she knew without sight. She would have to go from here, put distance between them that could not be closed. If only to return, to catch not even a minute of sleep on the floor like she deserved, pressed against the wall that met Shaw’s bed on the other side. She had to keep them safe. In the night, she did not cry but collapsed in on herself.