pitgirl

Springtime sits like an itch under Lottie’s skin. Winter is easier: the landscape dreams under a snowy blanket – calm, quiet, clean. Now the earth is waking up and her visions waking with it. Lottie has a reputation for steadiness, like a river rock unmoved by the current flowing over it. The townsfolk call her serious to her face, haughty when they think she’s out of earshot. The truth is, she’s learned not to react to things until she knows that other people perceive them too. 

A staccato burst of birdsong cuts across her thoughts. Lottie – alone in the parlour – looks up in time to see a flash of white feathers. The song is harsh, almost discordant, but something about it lands inside her deeply, like a sign. 

Lottie listens but all she can hear is the soft hum of crickets and the rhythmic thwack of someone, somewhere chopping wood. The parlour is safe, everything neat and predictable, even the birds are stuffed and kept immobile in glass cases with mirrored glass behind their eyes. Lottie has memorised it down to every detail; nothing here can trick and surprise her. It’s a sanctuary of sorts, but a maddening one.  Perhaps that’s why, despite herself, she rises and follows the sound of birdsong.

The porch that wraps around the Matthews’ ranch house is empty of everything but shade and shadows; the afternoon sun catches drifting motes of dust, making the air shimmer. Lottie feels a familiar sense of disappointment before the distinctive trill-chirp sounds again to her right. Lottie has time to glimpse a small black and white songbird perched on the corner railing.The bird glances at her, ruffles its feathers in an impatient sort of way and then flits around the corner and out of sight. 

Impulsively, Lottie follows it and comes face to face with the new ranch hand, chopping wood. They haven’t spoken yet, although Lottie already knows her name. Shauna came here from the Taylor ranch; town gossip has it that the cabinet maker’s apprentice broke her heart when he married Jacqueline Taylor instead of her. There were other rumours too, ones spoken in low voices, about a baby born out of wedlock who died before it could live. Now Lottie’s father has taken Shauna on out of charity. Although charity for who, Lottie isn’t sure: Shauna works harder than the other hands for less pay, taking the hardest, bloodiest jobs without complaint. 

Shauna has stripped her shirt off, down to a thin undershirt turned clingy and translucent from her sweat. Her breasts are bound for practicality but either she’s done a poor job of it or there’s a lot to bind: Lottie can see the outline of them under Shauna’s shirt, the way the binding pushes her cleavage up past the neckline of the too-large men’s vest she wears. She’s chopping firewood like it’s personally offended her: her soft features are hardened by a scowl and she lets out a little grunt every time the axe lands which sounds almost like a snarl of rage. Her arms are muscled like a man’s, Lottie notices, brown and freckled from working outdoors and beaded with sweat but her skin is smooth. The bird sits on a fencepost and Lottie watches it watching Shauna. 

Then Shauna looks up, and catches Lottie staring. 

“Can I help you with something?” Shauna’s voice is gruff and irritated, enunciating the words like a series of bites. Lottie is suddenly horribly aware of herself: the white lace dress, pink silk ribbons, of how it must look to Shauna – the owner’s daughter coming to watch her work. 

“I was looking at–” Lottie corrects herself just in time. It’s not like her to stumble; she feels caught off guard by the force of the other girl’s stare. “That is, I thought I heard birdsong.”

“Oh him?” Shauna’s eyes flick to the small white bird, watching her from its fencepost. She glances at Lottie, her brow furrowed but it’s not the look that Lottie’s come to dread: a moment of confusion, quickly rationalised away, which means she’s said something odd. Shauna looks wrongfooted, as though she expected an order or an insult and doesn’t know what to do now that neither is forthcoming. “He must smell the blood on me. From the slaughter house.”

Lottie peers at the bird, frowning. It’s small and white with a black stripe across its eyes like an outlaw’s mask.

“That bird?” 

Shauna laughs. It’s not exactly kind laughter but not unkind either. Lottie is seized with an overwhelming need to hear that sound again. 

“Well it’s a shrike. You know? A butcher bird? They’re carnivores.” Shauna glances at the bird, an odd half smile playing on her mouth. She looks like a predator herself; a cat batting a mouse between its paws, debating whether it’s worth the effort to strike. “Like to leave their prey impaled on thornbushes.”

She watches Lottie like she’s trying to gauge whether she’s going to turn tail and run inside.

“It looks so harmless,” Lottie says. 

“Yeah well.” Shauna’s face darkens and she hefts the axe again, bringing it down on the log so hard the pieces fly off in opposite directions. The butcher bird gives a startled little hop, then ruffles its feathers, grooming one wing with its beak. “Don’t go thinking pretty things can’t be vicious.”

There’s a naked hurt half hidden underneath the rage; as though the circumstances that led to her leaving the Taylor ranch might be more complicated than the town gossips let on. 

“It works both ways, you know.” Lottie makes her way down the veranda’s wooden steps, so they can stand on a level. 

Shauna quirks an eyebrow at her; it puts Lottie in mind of the quick irritated motion a horse makes when it shakes off a fly. 

“Vicious things can be pretty too.” Lottie only means that she sees beauty in places she’s not supposed to: bleached bones in a dried river bed; the blaze of wildfire in the dry season; the music of a wolf’s howl. She’s tired of staying indoors where everything is safe and unchanging, of carefully choosing every word. But there’s a flash of interest in Shauna’s eyes, as though she took it as Lottie calling her pretty – and vicious – and doesn’t mind the attention. 

Shauna tilts her head slightly, looking at Lottie as though she’s seeing her and not just a rich girl come to stare at her. 

“I’m Charlotte. Lottie. Lottie Matthews.” Somehow Lottie manages to stumble over her own name. Shauna watches with guarded amusement. 

“Yeah, I know who you are.” Shauna holds out her hand for Lottie to shake. It’s calloused, dirt under her fingernails and dried blood from the slaughterhouse worked into the grain of her knuckles; a test to see whether she’ll deign to touch a ranchhand. “Shauna.”

Lottie bites off her lace glove and takes the other girl’s hand, bare flesh against bare flesh. The touch is potent, the way the sky prickles before a storm. A sense of rightness settles in Lottie’s bones, like well water rising from a deep-buried spring; everything has led her to this moment, this meeting. Shauna’s breath catches, just a little. For once, Lottie knows that she’s not alone; whatever this is between them, Shauna feels it too.