Rider on the storm. by Justin Leigh Day

Author:Justin Leigh Day
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Crane & Phoenix Publishing
Published: 2014-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

The bloodier the better.

She was wearing her best dress, the yellow one with a bullet hole through its skirts. Her black hair was tucked under the rim of a mini top hat, the kind that Eastern ladies wore when riding their emasculated geldings; the whorish red choker had been replaced by a wide ribbon of unjewelled black lace that matched the fall of a black veil pinned to the hat so as to cover her visage with a gauze privacy screen; only the arching cupid’s bow of her lips held on to the coquettish character of a flash tailed saloon girl by being glossed over with a dusky red lip paint that shone through the filigree lace. Even the hooks and eyes of her shoes appeared to have undergone a spit polish makeover that presented her turn of ankle in an alluring light. Slumped under the washstand table resided a large carpet bag, bulked-out to straining by the accumulative effects of a person’s worldly belongings – Lisa was that person.

Jack locked the door and checked under the pillow for the ungainly surefire lump of his ‘Mule’. She watched him go about the domestic business of a gunslinger as though her prime rump wasn’t making a dip in the mattress. The methodical silence was on the ascendance when Jack lent his weight against the window frame and studied the street below. In the fusty glass he could just make out the trace reflection of his caller drop her chin in doleful uncertainty – there seemed to be an evocative presence appearing over his shoulder wherever he looked nowadays. And what did this current apparition evoke… he wasn’t sure? Feelings were a perplexity of contorted impulses that twined with the root of his frayed sub-conscious until knotted into a tangled ball that could not be unpicked by reason; sometimes emotional unions were concomitant with his physical needs - indefinite lingering’s in the background of his mind like an unreachable itch between his shoulder blades, until they were scratched bloody by a frantic abrasion of jagged fingernails running down his spine. Internal forces would flash and fade within him like a stubborn match refusing to ignite, and sometimes a lucky strike would catch so that the impenetrable complexities of the emotional human maze would brighten long enough to make some kind of headway in the stymieing gloom, but mostly he just fumbled about in the recondite dark.

The bed springs creaked behind when his unsettled guest got up and heel clicked over to the table to fetch away her tote bag. He said nothing. From amid the heaving contents she pulled out a familiarly shaped bottle and gently placed it on the table without ostentatious ceremony, before making ready to exit: presumably, from the room, the hotel and from Jack’s life for good, “Stay,” he told her “For a drink,” - a match was struck.

Unremarked by the restrictive nuance of reflected glass, Lisa’s dusky red lips skipped a little smile at one corner of her painted mouth when he granted that she could remain.

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