Chapter 3: Love in a Fistful of Dust

            In the dark, the woman danced, slim and silver. Tom fixated on her, for there was nothing else to see. How he could see a woman dancing naked without light he did not know, but he did see every bit of her clearly, from her ankles to her nipples to her eyes.

            She caught him watching and flicked a smile his way. Her liquid dance enticed him; she flowed and swirled, her arms falling and curving through the air. Every move deliberate, forming patterns that weren’t there unless he imagined them. Her thighs lifted her legs with just as much dexterity as her arms; deliberate, slow.

            Then she sped up. She never thrashed. If anything, the speed only added to her grace. In the midst of it all, he could feel her dancing in time with his racing heart. Pounding and swirling, pounding and swirling…

            She stopped and took hold of his face; he was amazed to hear his heart still beating its cadence. More amazed to smell her now, so close, with her breath on his skin. She was sweet, like honey. With her so close, Tom found himself unable to breathe…

            When was the last time someone had touched him? He lived in a town full of people, yet when was the last time he had touched anyone or been touched in return? She caressed his cheeks, his stubble. He wanted to find something to say, anything. She had a tattoo of the moon cupping her right eye. He traced it and she smiled. Her skin was cool to the touch.

            It was not his place but he kissed her anyway, and she did not run away nor did he hold her in place. He closed his eyes and she entwined her arms and legs around his body and they slowly sank back onto the dark nothingness. She had sapped all the energy from his legs. His loins throbbed.

            Tom moaned into her mouth as she continued kissing him. He sought her and made love in the dark while inside his mind exploded with light.

            “Argh…” Tom cried as she raked his back with her nails. Sharp as glass. He imagined her clawing so deep into him that she would puncture his lungs.

            There came a calm. She laid there on top of him, his hands on her and hers on him. At any moment the storm would come again. He heard his breathing, ragged, and felt the blood dripping down his back. It stung. She ran her hands along his wounds, then brought her head down to his ear. From her mouth came whispers from a voice unaccustomed to speaking with a human tongue.

            He listened. Her words filled him. His teeth clinched. He flung her off of him and fled, down, down, into the dark, away from her claws and her kisses.

            “There is something!” Tom said. “And I will find it!”

            Tom awoke sputtering sand. He was breathing. He was alive. He climbed.

            His hands burst from the sand, scrambling for a hold. Sand clung to every inch of him, and in his right hand he still held his boot that had smelled so foul.

            “Oh God… oh man…”

            Wearily, he pulled himself up and put the boot back on his foot. He didn’t know if he’d make it back to Rosetown now, but he had to try.

            He didn’t want the bitch from the whirlwind laughing at his corpse.

Chapter 2: The Wind and the Boot

            His feet shuffled, kicking up sand with each stride. The wind, sounding all the while like a lonely judge in search of criminals, howled around him, nearly drowning out his thoughts. The thirst was the only thing more driving.

            Tom fell in the sand, his bare hands and knees punching holes in it.

            “Going naked was not as nice as it sounded,” Tom told himself. Looking down into the sand, he started to wonder if this was it, that he had come out here to die. He laughed. He looked up at the gray clouds rolling above the dunes.

            He laid down on his back, wincing at the heat. The weary ache in the bottom of his lungs and thighs said enough; lay down already. Lay it all down. Tom stared at the clouds and tried to picture shapes up there in the gray nothingness.

            A castle. A shamrock. A big pair of breasts. A bird (pig, maybe?) A carton of milk. No faces, which he had expected. Then he shot to his feet.

            “WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU!” Tom stabbed his finger at the sky. “WHY THE FUCK DID YOU THROW ME IN HERE JUST TO WADDLE AROUND AND DIE!”

            Tom’s chest heaved and then he collapsed on his knees again. The shout had taken its toll. “Shouldn’t have done that…” Tom slumped forward. He whispered into the sand. “Give me something new…”

            The wind around continued to flit over the dunes. Then came the rising pitch, the roar. The wind picked up strength and Tom felt it nearly rip the hairs off his back.

            “What the—” He cupped himself to protect his penis as he turned over.

            A whirlwind was approaching, a hybrid of the unseen wind and the sand it had ripped from the desert floor. It headed straight for him.

            Nowhere to run… except…

            Tom scrabbled at the sand, digging down into it. Would he take a chance at being buried alive instead of having the flesh stripped from his bones? Yes, I want to die with little Tom still dangling between my legs.

            His hands hurt to dig, but then he was in the hole, sand continuing to fall on top of him. With any luck, the wind would keep blowing sand on top of his hiding place, sealing him off from the twister’s worst ravages. He hoped. He was mad. Then again, he was the one who walked bare ass naked into the desert dressed in only his boots.

            He pulled off one of his boots and jammed his mouth into it. How much air would it give him? It smelled so bad he wanted to gag. Sand fell over the mouth of his hiding place, and the wind continued to howl.

            “Let’s see who gets you first now, Tommy Dunegale: suffocation or the force of nature.”

            Soon, the only thing louder than the twister above him was the sound Tom made as he breathed in and out of his boot that still reeked of the sweat of his feet.

Chapter 1: Bored Tom

            The wind whipped under the gray clouds as Tom Dunegale sucked the last of the liquor from his flask. When the last drop fell on his tongue, he threw it down in the dust before him and shot it. Nothing trickled out of the hole onto the ground.

            “Now why’d you go and do that? You loved that thing,” Bix said, sitting on a barrel with her pink bunny at her feet nibbling grass. Tom regarded them, his face steely eyed, and he stood and turned back toward the bar down the street.

            “Damn thing’s empty,” he said.

            “And where are you going now?”

            “To get another one.”

            “There is no other one!” Bix shouted, making the bunny’s ears perk up. Tom briefly considered shooting at the bunny to scare it, but he might miss and end the bunny’s life. Bix loved that thing, almost as much as Tom loved his liquor.

            Tom’s feet hammered into the dust of the bar and he went behind the counter. He checked every bottle: empty. He loaded his arms full and hauled them outside, setting them up on the empty hitching post. Ten bottles. Ten bullets in his gun, he figured.

            Tom fired. BAM! Bottle one. BAM! Bottle two. BAM! Bottle three—

            “Dammit, Tom! You’re as crazy as the rest of this damn town—”

            “Fuck you, I’m bored.” Tom kept firing, but on bottle eight his gun went click. Reversing his grip on it, Tom went up to the last three bottles and broke them with savage pistol whips. Then he looked at the glass and hissed through his teeth. The old man regarded him.

            “Damn kid. Someone’s liable to cut up their feet with a mess like that.” The old Indian crept out from his Dry Goods store with his dirty magazine slung under his arm. “That racket keeps a man from doing things.”

            “I figured…” Tom looked at the man. Weather beaten wasn’t the word… more like cut up by the weather. The Indian (Splitfoot was his name) had cracks all over his skin that bled a bit when the weather got really dry, but his deep black eyes seemed to see all. There used to be machines long ago that could see like that, Tom thought, but not anymore.

            What was the phrase? The world had moved on… so where the fuck did that leave them? Bix the black girl, Splitfoot, Farmer Rooter out north of town, and him, Tom Dunegale…

            “If you hate it so much, why didn’t you put a bullet in your brain before you ran out of them altogether?”

            Tom shrugged. Splitfoot had a point.

            “Don’t want to be bored forever. Just bored for today.”

            Splitfoot smiled, blood forming in the center of his lip. “That’s a good thought.” The Indian wandered into the back of his store to jerk off.

            With the help of a dustpan, Tom cleaned up the mess he had made. He looked up at the sky and wished that the sun would come out.

            “I’m in fucking hell, I just know it,” he said to God, who he was sure was always above him. “I don’t remember coming here. I just know that I hate it here.”

            Tom looked down at his clothes, the plaid shirt and the white undershirt and his denim pants and his black boots. He stripped them away and threw them in the center of the street.

            The sand was surprisingly hot; he shoved his feet back into his boots.

            “Where you going now, Tom?” Bix shouted from her window in the stable’s second floor. “And where you going buck naked?”

            “I’m going out on the baked plains to get a sand bath! Maybe I’ll find something… new. You know?”

            “I know you got a great ass!”

            Tom huffed and walked out of Rosetown, the sign creaking in the wind overhead as he passed under it. He didn’t bother looking back.

Preface