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http://www.authorsden.com/adstorage/ 29292/DESPRADO.MID
still, she speaks a Desperado language, her oil-cloth duster repels the storm before the calm, she pulls a long lavender sock from her buckskin saddlebag and takes a nip of apricot brandy, the meadows the color of marmot fur, like her, they survive at this elevation on alpine meadow grass, she rides on, passes by a fallen ponderosa pine, it's tough grain all twisted into a whipping pole licorice-stick spiral, lightning-welded, just how she feels, the bolt hit high up and spun down, a horn-shaped snag she hit, the Desperado's Landmark of the stout gear that released her from it, Barbed Wire's Daughter, once tangled up in it,
*I****I****I****I***
some 4 miles ahead, her woman heats water for Desperado's bath and puts a fresh quilt on the feather tick to warm her when she makes it home from the wilds of the 1880s West, the years she prefers to live in, tumbleweeds line up against the fences, Desperado never fearing a drought when she heads in the direction of that beaver who clutches a stick to stir the bathsalts,
*I****I****I****I***
she dismounts at an old windmill, takes off her dusty clothes, washes her "she knows better" off in the stock tank, dresses back into her dusty clothes remembering what Mark Twain said, "Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul," Desperado remounts her horse and turns back on the trail she came on, the stick the beaver clutches to stir the bathsalts floats on the bathwater, her woman folds the quilt into fourths, places it back in the cedar hope chest,
*I****I****I****I***
Desperado rides past a lonely ranch woman's house where turnstiles once kept out stray livestock, her loving woman on the other end of the trail blows out the oil lamp, another moonless night without Desperado,
*I****I****I****I***
Desperado peeks in the window at walnut elegance and the stick floating on the bathwater, the ranch woman's bunkhouse cold and no warm quilt, she's back home from the wilds of the 1880s West, maybe tomorrow a roadrunner will tempt her in a race, she tucks the cameo she bought at the General Mercantile under her woman's pillow, and lights the oil lamp...
Copyright 2006 Sage Sweetwater, firebrand lesbian novelist
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