Notes - **Mature readers only, brief mention of SA **- I’m trying to write with _Blood Meridian_ prose - darkness, briefness, lack of commas and lack of good sense.

**Somewhere in the Wild West…**

There is a boy whose face is soft and slender like the face of a lamb, and whose eyes are dead. His name is Frank Calhoun and he drives a small horse-drawn wagon. He seems ordinary to most. They call him quiet but a good shot for his age.

On a certain evening Calhoun was sitting atop his wagon. In the last town, he had angered the lawmen. Then he had wandered to another dusty place where dead bushes, dried and curled, clawed out from the ground like the hands of the damned.

Calhoun’s wagon was small and empty enough to be quiet. Only three cans of kidney beans and a small jar stuffed with bird feathers clinked together occasionally, and the horse was as dumb as the boy.

A man in the distance didn’t hear the wagon, nor the horse, nor Calhoun’s pistol clicking. He was a man of average height but the girl he was pressing face-down to the ground was half his size and she was crying. Calhoun levelled his pistol and shot the man cleanly through the back of the head. Lifeless, he slumped over the girl’s back. Then Calhoun jumped down from the wagon and went over.

The man had no tent, only a bedroll and a mare, so Calhoun rolled the fabric up and tethered the mare to his wagon next to his other horse. He did this while the girl pushed the corpse away and sat upright. The girl looked at him. He stopped fishing in the corpse’s clothes and looked back at her.

The girl’s skin was snow against the scorched dirt. Her hair, brows and lashes were likewise white and her irises were violet. Small, pale hands smoothed down the skirt of her white dress. Most would have asked if she was a witch or an Angel. Calhoun just turned and hoisted himself back onto the wagon wordlessly. He was pulling the reins when she clambered up next to him uninvited. She gave him a smile. He didn’t return it.

Now she was clutching a large book to her chest. He frowned when he saw it because he hadn’t noticed it while plundering, and his frown deepened when he saw the words “HOLY BIBLE” imprinted on the thick spine. He was illiterate and so was his father before him, but he knew those words. When the girl opened the Bible, the only other words he could make out were “In” and “The” and along the margin written in light pencil, “To Dove” - which suited the girl as a name.

Dove read the scriptures in the dying rays of sun while Calhoun drove. They didn’t talk, not once during the night. She didn’t request to be taken anywhere and he didn’t ask if she was alright. He only broke the silence with a grunt when he hopped down to relieve himself after some hours. Morning was blazing down on them at this time.

Dove hopped down too. A plump, sort of leapord-patterned lizard with a black head was sitting by the wheel of the wagon, and Dove lowered her chin to the dirt and looked into its beady eyes. It tasted the air by her nose with a forked tongue. She started to giggle and nudge her nose against its mouth. Then, a crunch as Calhoun drove a blunt knife through the lizard’s neck from above.

Dove reeled her head back and glared up at him. The face of a fallen star. He didn’t react. Held the knife in place. There was no boyish grin nor mirth, just a queer sincerity. Then he pulled the knife out with a wet sound and nodded to the wagon. He got on, but she didn’t. He waited a short moment before snapping the reins. She got on then.