South of Cimarron
by
Shanmei
dedicated to J.L.B
I took an expensive cigar from my vest pocket and tore the bottom of it with my teeth. I lit it with my gold lighter and looked up. The clouds were high in the sky and ran swiftly and swollen with rain through the city, pushing up into the highlands.
I was a gambler.
I made my fortune, I honestly don't always admit it, cleaning up the rough and brawling gold diggers at the green table. I learned how to cheat from my father. As a child he used to take me to saloons, brothels and gambling houses. The aniseed-smelling girls were kind, the “marks” my father plucked clean gave me candy, the sheriffs with the silver star on their chest pinched my cheeks.
I remember the velvet, the gold, the mirror of those wonderful hotels where it always seemed that someone was expecting us.
And I especially remember my father's hands, beautiful, when he tossed the cards in the air thick with smoke, tobacco, sweat and decomposed flowers.
Then my father died, like all cheaters, because of an overly nervous gunslinger and left me his shirts with lace collars, his damask vests, his gold cuff-links.
My father always told me: “A professional player can be recognized by the clothes he wears”.
I was under no illusions.
My world had little of the poetic, much less possessed that twilight charm that the naive used to attribute to it.
I lived in wicked times, in a land of violent, cold-blooded murder without burial, corrupt sheriffs, drunkards and cowards; of beautified whores recycled as the wives of senators; of cattle thieves; of tuberculous preachers with a Colt hidden in the Bible.
It was a land soaked in blood.
The old West was like that.
But now there were the railway, the carpet-baggers, the outlawed women, the sellers of miraculous ointments, even Sitting Bull was the star in a circus.
A world that was dying, and so was I.
But at night in my memory still echoed the dull sounds of the horses' hooves on the loose earth, the echoes of the shots, the out of tune songs of the girls. I saw in the shadows the sad profiles of the lonely riders.
Now everything was gone, like a cloud of dust over the hill.
I closed my eyes.
Two eyes as dirty as two pools of mud.
My West was gone.
I took an expensive cigar from my vest pocket and tore the bottom of it with my teeth. I lit it with my gold lighter and looked up. The clouds were high in the sky and ran swiftly and swollen with rain through the city, pushing up into the highlands.
I was a gambler.
I made my fortune, I honestly don't always admit it, cleaning up the rough and brawling gold diggers at the green table. I learned how to cheat from my father. As a child he used to take me to saloons, brothels and gambling houses. The aniseed-smelling girls were kind, the “marks” my father plucked clean gave me candy, the sheriffs with the silver star on their chest pinched my cheeks.
I remember the velvet, the gold, the mirror of those wonderful hotels where it always seemed that someone was expecting us.
And I especially remember my father's hands, beautiful, when he tossed the cards in the air thick with smoke, tobacco, sweat and decomposed flowers.
Then my father died, like all cheaters, because of an overly nervous gunslinger and left me his shirts with lace collars, his damask vests, his gold cuff-links.
My father always told me: “A professional player can be recognized by the clothes he wears”.
I was under no illusions.
My world had little of the poetic, much less possessed that twilight charm that the naive used to attribute to it.
I lived in wicked times, in a land of violent, cold-blooded murder without burial, corrupt sheriffs, drunkards and cowards; of beautified whores recycled as the wives of senators; of cattle thieves; of tuberculous preachers with a Colt hidden in the Bible.
It was a land soaked in blood.
The old West was like that.
But now there were the railway, the carpet-baggers, the outlawed women, the sellers of miraculous ointments, even Sitting Bull was the star in a circus.
A world that was dying, and so was I.
But at night in my memory still echoed the dull sounds of the horses' hooves on the loose earth, the echoes of the shots, the out of tune songs of the girls. I saw in the shadows the sad profiles of the lonely riders.
Now everything was gone, like a cloud of dust over the hill.
I closed my eyes.
Two eyes as dirty as two pools of mud.
My West was gone.
NUNUM
Blending Flash Fiction & Art
independent press, independent publisher, independent publishing, lit mag, literary journal, literary magazine, small press, small publisher, small publishing, small magazine, small journal, paying market, submission opportunity, submission opportunities, flash fiction submission opportunity, nano-fiction submission opportunity, sudden fiction submission opportunity, microfiction submission opportunity, prose poetry submission opportunity, short fiction submission opportunity, short short fiction submission opportunity