Lerida helped herself into the car, slamming the door behind her. Rust red and dusty, it has hurtled her through hell and back numerous times, and like it, she'd come out with only a few more scars and burns than last time, but still resilient and old noted; the blues sung her, not the other way round. She was a hymn, a spiritual, something both swamp and cornfield echoed on a hot afternoon when the sky looked like it ought to fall and cover the world in wicked ozone, when the old trees told stories with their leaves and sometimes a fortune, when the moon was a tarot war for a weary, dreamer, traveler.

She spun out the side of the road, gravel kicked up behind back wheels as she went skidding and howling down the road, some hellion woman who belonged on a motorbike, on a horse, a stage coach not a hulk of metal, a beast, a rugged machine. But it was her home as much as a vessel and so to it she stayed close and kept herself locked in of a night, eye cocked to that fortune-tellin' planet while she loaded and unloaded bullets in the back seat, peering out at the desert through a paisley curtain strung up along the ceiling of the car, and kept so by tucking out of the windows and winding them till they trapped the seam in place. She would then curl up and in a hot car that smelt of loneliness and long stretches of naked road, she slept.

This was her life.

Hunting for kidnappers, liaisians with skeletons, troubadors, outlaws, that wasn't her game anymore, wasn't where she tread. Now it was the open road and her, and just the two of them, the highway and its philosopher bandit queen, her who stole away across the sand, writing her signature in the stones.

Something sacred, and silent, like a painting of Georgia O'Keefes pristine, sullen land, like bones.

UNFORGIVEN

Scrawled in graffiti along a strip of rock south west of the tip of this land, where the desert gave way to weeds and weeds to bridges and bridges to overpass and finally the keyhole of all that was the goddamn Nexus, festooned in creepy, always-unfamiliar chemistry that zapped and zinged and ripped you from the sky into its disfigured orbit so that you landed wherever you might and the hail didn't stop for no one.

She gets out and looks over the familiar terrain, remembering how she lost her mind, how she lost loves, how she lost her soul.....And then she smiled and remembered that somewhere over the last couple months out in the scorching light she rekindled herself and reconciled herself and now all those tattered days meant nothing, and no one would remember for her if she chose to forget.

There was something different in Lerida. When others saw her they no longer got the incense of thought filled with images of ripcurls and mean tides, of dark hallways and smokey parlours, and neither did the desert stick to her skin. She indeed evoked an altogether different playground of consciousness; wrought iron curling like lace and ivy about staircases, burnished, bronze bars, tents with an overcast sky above, her there, snake over her shoulders, smile in her eyes, the world was her dessert some said.