#wr.

How are youu

I am IllTM.

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NAME: Babe Miranda GENDER & PRONOUNS: Cis Woman / She/Her AGE & DATE OF BIRTH: 35 years old / August 13th HOMETOWN: El Paso, TX TIME IN GREAT FALLS: 23 years RESIDENCE: Ward Ranch OCCUPATION: Ranch Manager at Ward Ranch

BACKSTORY —

 tw: sexual assault, death

Your girlhood is exhibited on the floor beneath the passenger seat, a museum display of livelihood that rattles and shifts with each bend in the road and every twist in fate: emptied tin cans and flattened pennies engraved with carnival brands, flowers torn up from the roadside, guts ripped from dysfunctional scanners and overheated radars you rest your wet socks on. You spend this early life, without metaphor, as an accessory to the storm — packed into your father’s truck, running towards the things everyone else hides from. We chase storms, he tells you one night, so that one day there won’t be any more running — toward or away. We’ll just be able to stand there and let them pass over us, clean as a sheet. A bare toe presses into the cola can below as you chew your sandwich, considering this. When you lift your foot, you hear its metal ribcage snap back into place, a little tin chest taking quick, unregulated breaths. And then – do you think we’ll see mom again? You think of her in the kitchen, back turned to the stove, the scent of frying alcapurrias in the air. Your father might have spent his life trying to tie a leash to cyclones, but it’s your mother you remember as god-like, spine straight and grease splattering on either side, parting around her like a scalding red sea. He swallows before he answers and never looks over. 

Your mother — REDACTED. You don’t like to remember the rest of that reply.

Destiny has winds a lot like a tornado, you’ll think later: gale-force. Unstoppable. Unpredictable, despite the equipment you drag out and haul to the centre in an attempt to divine and understand. So when you blow into town on the gusts of suspicion on the next great storm, rolling to a stop at a gas station in some town in Montana, you think little of it. The Great Plains had been built to withstand twisters, to your eye: all those roving fields and flat spaces, so little to tear up from the earth but the old brick buildings. When your father chats animatedly with the man at the pump next to him about your intentions and receives an invite to dinner in return, you think even less of it; he was like that, bright, bold, and whirring, charismatic in his eccentricity — whoever he spoke to was pulled in willingly or not, drawn into the prophecies of oncoming storms and doomsday tales of previous squalls. 

What you do think a great deal of, at twelve years old and with dirt-blackened feet that have never stopped moving, is the ranch you pull up on next: wide and unending as god’s eyeline, as his reach, as your mother’s smile, all under the metal-hammered words WARD RANCH. But you’d never thought much of religion anyway — not in the way you’d come to worship distant memories and the reality this land. Does he really own all this, papa? You crane your neck as you pull up the driveway, jostled as the car runs over a large stone. Your father is staring out the window too. I don’t know. I suppose he tries.

You never leave after that, not really. It’s a mixture of the southern hospitality you’ve grown used to and something you won’t understand until later — your mother in the kitchen had provided acts of god, fistable acts of love with her cooking and your father with his truck and instruments had chased them, but Jim Ward actively sought to be god himself. You spend dinner with his family and then retire to a guest house larger than any home you’ve ever had, welcomed to make use of the amenities while you divine the arrival of the next great destruction. It just so happens that when it arrives, warned by his own in-house prophet of the winds, the Ward patriarch is the first to know about it. 

The Ward ranch and livestock do unusually well for the twister that rocks through Great Falls and the surrounding cities. On the day it blows through, the only thing god can take from Jim Ward is a fistful of grass and a few lame cows.

I know you’re the roving kind, Hector, but that girl needs somewhere solid to put her feet down. You let her keep spinning with you the rest of her young life and she’s gonna end up directionless as those storms you’re chasing, not knowing what’s up or down. I know you see the way she looks at those horses; damn, Hector, two of my guys could barely keep her out of the pen. She wants to be here. And I think you do too. It’s been months before you overhear it, and you’ve waited every day to catch those words in the conch shell of your ear — an excuse to stay. You’ve watched as Jim catches your father’s wrist each time he winds up a reason to leave, coaxing and commanding all at once, and waited for him to pull free. You could see the pair of you inching closer to the door with each week, equipment piled by the umbrella stand — until suddenly it’s all packed away, tucked neatly into an office.  

So you stay. Your father becomes the resident meteorologist, a job weaned onto Hector Miranda by the authoritative hand of his patron on Great Falls’s pulse, stationed on Ward land.  

You’d been a quiet girl because there’d been so little opportunity to open your mouth — only for your father or the songs on the radio, with all the rest lost to the sound of wind through a rolled-down window. When you’d stopped at gas stations and rest stops, your father had done the talking for the both of you. And in the clear yellow light of Great Falls, coming into your girlhood, you’re still quiet — quiet in the sense of chicory and shepherd’s purse and dandelions, crabgrass and thistle and all those weeds who rise upward through cracks in the ground and overgrown gardens with silent but violent delight. As soon as you put roots down you prove to be a wild thing, not in the way of a wayward child but that of all the things that grow on this ranch, on this land you come to love so consumingly. You race into the fields at midnight to watch how moonlight hits a still lake of switchgrass and stray too close to the howls that come from the edge of the woods, looking for yellow eyes in the dark; it’s your innate curiosity that enables, and your childhood hunting tempests that steels you. Danger, it would seem, is relative to a girl who has stood within a cyclone. Danger, it could be said, is the blood relative of that girl.

You’re not the Ward Girl, that much is known by all, but you are the Ward ward, as they like to say about town. A weed-like girlhood sprouts into a womanhood of greater wilds, now more fox than dandelion, more coyote than white clover once you start growing up into the shape of womanhood, a silhouette nobody can undo. Everybody knows you, not only for that compelling and disturbing animal-and-honey wildness you possess, but for the ways you make yourself identifiable. Back in your first months on the ranch you were on a horse before anyone had offered the opportunity (and thrown from it before anyone could extend a hand to catch); a thin handful of years later they’ll swear you’ve got sugar cubes tucked up your veins with how they move into you. But like has always called to like, and so it makes sense — one unbroken thing to another, they listen. So that is how they learn you: that horse whisperer, the girl with her head leaned out the window of a speeding car, the one strangely loyal to a family she doesn’t belong to.

When you graduate there are not two roads, but two men. Your father expects a trajectory that mirrors his own, time spent tucked away in multiple degrees to learn the family business of science and thoughtless nomadism; James Ward offers a job, a bridge past years in stone walls that leads directly onto the open fields, those pastures that waver in the sunlight but never move.

There’s two men, and one road. Your father is the one to drive down it, off into a dark sky, when you make your choice.

You rise the next morning to a great yellow sun, cracked over the sky like a running yolk.

It’s been like that ever since, skies that go black and rise again gold — womanhood that dips and pitches, waxes and wanes. The only thing that swells and never dies is your loyalty to the Ward name and the things that exist beneath it, an oath that only braids itself thicker the day you go into the woods in white and emerge in blood. That’s why it surprises everyone but you when Jim calls you into the house and sits you at the same table you broke bread at two decades ago, the pair of you a setting sun and a rising moon. 

I’m not much longer here, kid. It’s going to need you, this place. It’s going to need you the way you need it.

When you lay in bed that night, your breathing is still and deep, calmer than anything your wild heart has produced all your life. You close your eyes to the sounds of the cicadas and think of your father.

The storm is passing over me. Clean as a sheet.

NAME: Phoebe Rhodes GENDER & PRONOUNS: Cis Woman / She/Her AGE & DATE OF BIRTH: 32 years old / June 28th HOMETOWN: Great Falls, MT TIME IN GREAT FALLS: Returned 5 years RESIDENCE: Canyon Point OCCUPATION: Wranger at Ward Ranch, Singer at Neon Moon

BACKSTORY —

Born at the end of Spring in Great Falls, Phoebe Rhodes’ parents did their best to provide for their two daughters, despite the bills piling up and the peeling wallpaper and the creaking floorboards that were rotting. Phoebe was content with it all, trying her best to help distract her little sister from the weight of their families disadvantages Phoebe had been burdened with unintentionally. Their daddy called her ‘my little songbird’ — for she tweeted and whistled whatever song had been playing on the radio, and there was no stopping Phoebe when she got an itch for a new favorite song. 

As a rambunctious child in school, Phoebe was extremely unfocused, and struggled in certain subjects that had her spending most of her time in the library trying to catch up on studying — since home wasn’t exactly her favorite spot to show just how stressed she had been.  Throughout middle school Phoebe began spending a lot of time in the music room where she picked up an old acoustic guitar that was seemingly twice her size. However, seeing how quick her interest peaked with the instrument, her then music teacher allowed her to take it home, as long as she promised to come back each day with something new that she learned — and it was a promise she kept whole-heartedly. With her new found confidence, that blossomed with each new pluck of the strings, she entered into the many talent shows her school offered throughout the years, with no real mind if she won or lost.

 Carrying her love for music all the way through high school, Phoebe’s grades improved, and by ‘some miracle’, her ma’ used to say, she graduated at the top of her class, with a full ride to NYU.  With her new found independence, Phoebe said goodbye to her little ol’ hometown, and kissed her family goodbye with her guitar strapped onto her back and a lone suitcase that she lugged all the way to New York. With promises to write them everyday, and frequent returns throughout the year, it was a promise Phoebe couldn’t quite keep. 

After a few months, her letter quit arriving and her holiday trips would constantly get pushed back until even the daily phone calls stopped. Her world had quickly become wrapped up in her ever-growing music career and the determination to be discovered was turning into a raw addiction. With gigs after gigs lined up for her and her then band (led by her then boyfriend), it was a lifestyle Phoebe yearned for, craved even. They were unstoppable with their name in lights almost every weekend and an onstage chemistry that was unmatched by the local talent. However, that had all came crashing down around after the news from home finally reached her.   

Her father’s unexpected illness caused an ache so deep in Phoebe’s heart that she wasn’t sure how to recover from it. Her aspirations and dreams had been set aside, tossed on the back burner to rush back home to her parent’s side and care for her ill-stricken father at the tender age of 25; which in turn caused her then relationship to take an unexpected break.  since then, phoebe has continued to take charge of her family once more — exchanging guitar strings for saddles and stilettos for a very worn in pair of boots; only fitting since she had taken over for her father at ward ranch. every once in awhile the thrill of singing in front of a crowd jolts her alive and she often sneaks away from her tiresome days to belt a tune or two down at neon moon, hoping her old beau would somehow make an appearance and bring that long lost spark back into her life.