A flick of pale hand through dark hair dislodged not a little dust.

"Walking can be a dirty business in this place, baby girl." Mamie whispered this, as if hesitant to speak aloud in a place where she'd no doubt spent so much time silent. "There'll be a piece of work to getting us clean, but it's fitting that we wash the trail from us and start anew."

At one end of the single room, next to the brick and mud fire pit, the latter set with iron rods for hanging pots, was a large tin vessel, in form quite like an outsized coal scuttle. From this she removed two iron-bound wood slat buckets, setting them on the packed dirt floor, and then proceeded to empty the container of its contents of small wood and dried buffalo chips.

"I'd normally bathe cold in the summer," she said, her voice still soft, "but this is a special occasion." With flint and moss, pine needles and dry grass, Mamie soon had flames chasing smoke up the crude chimney, and expertly fed the hungry infant blaze with wood scraps and buffalo chips until it blazed hot, adding to the small cabin's stifle despite the still open door.

Handing Madison one bucket, the blonde took the other and led the way downhill to a shallow well. Each time a pail was filled, Mamie inspected it closely, dipping her hand, bird quick, into the water to scoop out any small minnows that had been captured and return them to the well.

"They keep the wigglers down, the mosquito larvae," she explained. "Bugs don't bother me much, but a woman still wants to do things right."

The trip back uphill to the cabin, laden with buckets of water, was more of a struggle than the trip down. Two pails-full almost topped off a large iron pot hung from a hob over the fire. The water was left there to warm while the women repeated the chore. Though Madison knew well what her lover was, she still might have wondered at the ease with which Mamie handled this onerous repetitive chore.

Finally enough water had been heated to fill the tin bathtub, the container first turned over and thumped to remove the worst of the detritus left by dried dung and firewood.

"You first, baby girl," Mamie whispered after this had been accomplished. "Guest gets the clean water. We'll wash the clothes and towel in it after we're through."

Madison did as instructed, The galvanized tub was surprisingly roomy, and the water not hot but almost at the temperature of the room. Still, there was a comfort to slipping into it. More so when the blonde produced a bar of crude soap and set to washing her guest.

There was an air of the maternal in this process, deliberate and efficient, but a mother would not have lingered so over soaping and massaging the woman's breasts, nor dallied at the dark fur beneath her belly, opening and exploring the petals beneath.

The bath was over far too soon, given such attentions, and Mamie helped Madison out, wrapped her in a scrap of blanket that served as a towel.

"You just dry off and rest yourself on the bed," she whispered, her small voice gone throaty. "I'll be with you in just a shake."

With that Mamie shed her own clothes and kicked them into a pile with Madison's to be soaked after the bathing, both women having packed a change of costume in their knapsacks. Mamie stepped into the tub, bent to scrub her head and stood, her blond hair and the sparse patch below gone from pale gold to caramel with the wetness. She posed briefly like that, slender and small-breasted, the muscles of her calves and arms tight and clearly defined, then sat in the tub and washed herself with quick efficiency.

When she was satisfied, she stepped out, scrubbed herself with the damp scrap of blanket, and then tossed that and the clothing into the tub to soak, water and wood being two things one never wasted in this place.

She knew the brunette's eyes we on her, and moved with slow deliberation to the sacked hay and sage that served as a mattress.

"I want you to just stay still this time, baby girl," she whispered, "while I welcome you to my world."

For a half an hour she did so, her strange blue-gray eyes never leaving Madison's, as her strong, clever hands adored the woman head to toe, circling and pinching and gradually, gradually, increasing their invasion.

Only at the end, when those long fingers hooked and thrust again and again, and Madison quite violated the silence of the room with her moans and gasps and, finally, helpless little yelps did Mamie lean in to kiss her lover gently and slip down beside her on the mattress, her always cool flesh exaggerated by the heat of the room and the lowering flames of the fire.

"So tell me, baby girl," she whispered, chilly lips brushing against an ear warmed with passion and the lingering heat of the room, "how do you like Mamie's Kansas?"

"The sun was over our town; it was like a blade. Kicking cottonwood leaves we ran toward storms. Wherever we looked the land would hold us up." -William Stafford



Mamie was not a woman to speak for he sake of speaking, indeed she was as stingy with her words as she was generous in sharing her slender body with her lover. But as she stretched next to Madison in post-coital languor, there was a new depth to her silence, as if some internal debate, heavy with portent as a tornado sky, drowned out any words that might bubble into speech. After long minutes of this, she apparently came to a decision and stood. Moving with the strange, preternatural grace of the Kin, she fetched her lover's gun belt from its hang on the high back of the only chair, set it next to the crude mattress, and reclined again.

There on the bed, she took Madison's face in her hands as the woman has grasped hers only moments before, and stared into her eyes, Mamie's own a strange blue/grey in the half light of the crude cabin. She swallowed once, hard, as if that act could give her strength, and whispered.

"I want you to remember a warning I gave you when first we met, baby girl. I want you to remember it as hard as ever you can. If we can get past this, well, then my Kansas will have given us all that it can. If, if we make it, then you, or we if you'll have my aid, can tackle your journey and maybe, just maybe, at the end of that we can find a place for just us two."

She kissed the woman then, a chaste little peck, and lowered her mouth to Madison's throat.

This was nothing new, of course, they had enjoyed this peculiar lovemaking before, but still, as Mamie's delicate teeth pierced the skin in that most intimate of penetrations, as the call and call back of heart-song's began, the intensity of it startled Madison anew, a pleasure compared to which simple sex was like a playground swing matched to a bungee jump.

It went on, deeper and more maddeningly intimate, the blonde's body wrapped around her companion's with uncanny strength. And then the point was reached where Mamie would formerly have pulled away with an act of ferocious will. But she did not. Mewling softly against the torn throat, she suckled more hungrily, the wrap of her thin limbs tighter still.

Somewhere, deep in Madison's consciousness, a little panic was born, beating its wings against the great cage of pleasure like a coal-mine canary begging to fly to air.

"I could die here," Madison thought, the harsh concept gone to nonsense singsong in the wash of sensation that buffered it. If she tried to struggle it was quickly revealed as hopeless. Mamie Clover held her as surely as any coyote had ever pinned a jackrabbit. The pleasure sought to overwhelm the woman's fear, to paint death as pretty as a prairie spring in the wake of a warm wash of rain.

Still the blonde worried at her throat, mouthing little noises that might have been words but were slurred with blood and need. And Madison's heart, sick with feelings for the woman who was killing her, stuttered once, like an engine about to run dry of fuel.

"While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die."

-Leonardo da Vinci

There have always been two Mamie Clovers.

The first is very like a mortal woman, who loves and hurts and recovers; whose heart is as warm as her skin is cold, who clings to humanity as one on awakening might claw for the wet tissues of a dissolving dream.

It is the other that shares Madison's bed now, a creature of nothing more than appetite, a being that would eat the world and beg for more. In her more sentient moments, Mamie refers to this self as "the rat brain," and she both hates and respects it.

She has killed lovers before this, has awakened from frenzy to find a body that has known the sweet attention of her hands and fingers, her tongue and mouth, cold beside her, already going stiff; a thing as shameful as the rattle of bottles beside a drunkard's bed.

The rat brain guzzles, with no more compassion than a falling hawk. The rat brain gulps, greedy as a weasel in a hen coop. Beneath her, the body she feeds on twitches weakly, it's heart on the edge of blood starvation popping and missing like an engine struggling with watered gas.

And then she hears her name. Mamie. They dying woman has barely the breath to speak it. Were her killer's ear not so close to those lips, already losing their color, she would never have heard it. Mamie.

The rat brain tries to override those two weak syllables, gulps and gnashes still, but they have caught somewhere deep in the sleeping part of the woman's brain, repeating like a swollen cheek caught again and again on a ragged tooth. Mamie.

The gunshot sucks the air out of the room. The reek of cordite blooms like a sudden storm cloud. For every action an equal and opposite reaction; the bullet tears through Mamie's chest from side to side, sending a shrapnel of rib in its advance, bursting heart and puncturing lung; the recoil tears the revolver from the pale hand that hoisted it in defiance of the rat-brain, breaking a finger as it does, and clatters dully on the dirt floor.

Perhaps no one hears that sound. The rat brain is silenced. Two bodies lay tangled like lovers, pasted together by the slow drying of spilled blood.

Outside the sky tires of waiting, and bursts into rain. It drips through the crude roof, and the scent of settled dust beneath the downpour spreads over the prairie land as sweet as any morning.

"Sleep my little baby-oh Sleep until you waken When you wake you'll see the world If I'm not mistaken...

Kiss a lover Dance a measure, Find your name And buried treasure...

Face your life Its pain, Its pleasure, Leave no path untaken."

― Neil Gaiman,



A burst heart and deflated lung are not akin to a stubbed toe. Neither, however, are they in league with the slash of the Horne woman's treated razor; that gape across her shoulders that she had been unable to heal, had been forced to ask Madison to attend to with nothing more magical than needle and catgut and love.

Love. The single word tolled like a bell in her mind, at first the only thing there. Slowly sensations came back; the horrible tunnel cut across her by bullet and burst bone, the slow knitting of the violated flesh to mend that self-inflicted wound. The realization, reeking with irony, that such a healing might have been beyond her had she not been so full of Madison's blood.

Madison. The woman clearly survived, as she is not beneath the kindred's still immobile form. Mamie's face is pressed hard against the rough burlap of the mattress; she smiles, even that tiny movement of muscle aching along every inch of her terrible injury. The rat brain has been stopped, the animal foiled, and one of Mamie Clover's lovers has lived. She had of course intended that the gunslinger fire the shot, that Madison love herself enough to do so. The fact that she herself had done it, had found a path to choose love for Madison over self when lost so deeply in the rat brain's pit, provides a balm of peace that counters, at least somewhat, the endless pain of her rebuilding.

Rebuilding. The Mamie Clover who has just been part of one miracle is greedy enough to want another. She cannot turn herself yet, to do so would unknit too much of the still tentative mending. She cannot tell if Madison has fled or no, only that the door is open, only that the rains have come.

What she can do is raise her right arm, vertical from the elbow, a signal, a white flag of surrender. It almost costs her consciousness to do so. From the hand so elevated, the pathetic index finger (still broken, far down on the list of healing priorities), flops back and forth, pitiful as a boiled noodle

If one wishes to beckon a gunslinger, after all, what better to use than a trigger finger?

"I remember the time I was kidnapped and they sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof." Rodney Dangerfield

Whatever the intent of Madison's salute, whether it be to deny love or spit in the face of fate, it is lost on Mamie Clover, whose lips are still pressed against rough burlap, whose strange blue/grey eyes, closed by the mattress, look within.

Still she cannot turn, the knitting of cell and capillary within her too tenuous yet; movement might sunder those connections dearly purchased. Even the raised forearm is more than she should dare, and when she assumes it has been seen if it were see-able, she releases the muscles that lifted it and the limb falls limp again to the dirt floor.

The weather, as predicted, changed, and the winds that cleaned the blackboard above the prairie left behind them blue skies and kitten clouds. Inside the crude cabin one could almost imagine the rough mattress steaming as the temperature rose and drove the wet of rain and blood from it.

The change of weather made for a hothouse world. Though dry would come again soon as it always did, there was a brief illusion of rain forest, of luxuriant growth and the magical materialization of mushrooms. Mamie Clover has ever loved this bit of meteorological trickery, this reminder that anywhere on earth can, at least for a moment, become anywhere else. She smiles again, feeling the rain and dust and blood drying on her healing body. It is just enough to allow her to speak the words, muffled by burlap, into the imaginary equator around her.

"Baby girl?"