Cowboy

✧ 2023 World's Best Short-Short Story Contest Winner ✧

It’s a bad idea, walking out into burnished summer fields with him, seeking horses to ride. The gasoline smell of his Carhartt still stings my nose from the first hug hello in fifteen years, the sharp heat of his jaw lodged in my cheek. How long you in Montana for, he asked. Little while, I said.

Grad school awaits in the fall, but feels too far away to matter now. Shaved my head last week. Dad’s been awkward around me since, afraid to confirm I’m not doing well. There was, of course, a boyfriend left in Japan—Dad knows that much without asking.

This tall, bony man striding beside me was the first, back when I was five and he was six. I couldn’t have said whether I’d wanted his touch. Only that it felt cold and secret and mystical. Time has sanded his skin; vaulted his nose like an orogenic belt; re-pigmented the hair, the eyes, yet left the essence. This is so-and-so. You guys used to play together, Dad said, and I said, I know, thinking, You have no idea.

He’s staying here at the ranch with his parents again, attending NA meetings. Went off the rails for a decade while I was in undergrad, or living abroad; some combination of meth, alcohol, cars, and what the doctors call bipolar, but he calls a special type of wiring the medical community can’t wrap their tiny heads around. When I asked about the day the cops nailed him, he told me, grinning darkly, that he was the one chasing them. But he’s no crazier than I’d have been if I stayed. Or might be, if I don’t get out again soon enough.

Dad’s not wrong if he’s worried that I’m thinking about death: I do want to die here. Just not yet. There’s a certain kind of soul that only survives this wildly beautiful, merciless place by leaving, finding what they need, and bringing it back.

So what’s up with the clearcut? he asks.

Broken heart, I say.

I wonder what unmet need corrodes his own heart. How long it’ll take to kill him.

Maybe he’s forgotten what happened between us as kids. Boys tend to forget, whereas girls absorb everything. But the bridle in his hand, the way he whistles—C’mon, Goldie!—to the Palomino mare with a mane as white-blonde as my hair was then, scrapes the inside of me like a rough-cut piece of steel. Only I don’t dislike it. The sound of long grass, rushing against his jeans as we approach her.

Does it all come back to him? My craving for dirt? My love of roughness? Is he the reason I can’t feel anything at all unless it pierces me with strangeness and surprise?

Get on, he says, straddling the mare bareback, his tough, oil-blackened palm held out to pull me up in front of him.

And really, what choice do I have.

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FRANCESCA LEADER is a writer and artist originally from Western Montana. She was named runner-up in the 2020 “Big Sky, Small Prose” flash fiction contest, and awarded first prize in the Society of Classical Poets’ 2021 Poetry Translation Competition. You can learn more about her work at inabucketthemoon.wordpress.com, or find her on Twitter and Instagram (@mooninabucket/@moon.in.a.bucket).

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