Rawhide Cycle: A Death in the Family

Rawhide Chronicles: A Death in the Family

He had loved her.
She loved him.
His grave was a hole in her heart.
Her tears fell like rain into the thirsty dust.
Her hair, shining of sun, crimson of blood.
Her swollen eyes the green of dead pine.
Her knees bit the dust, she knelt.
Her face
His coffin
A final union.
Her cries were lapped up by the cruel wind
Eager for lament
In a land of death.
The dust covered both.
The dust of the wind.
The dust of a hundred bitter deaths.
Bitter in taste, bitter of feel.
The sun burned.
Eager to kill
A sun-baked land.
Rocks of solid fire
Burn her feet.
Her dying heart alights
One final wish.
Her mind goes back
Retrograde of past recalling
She sees the darkness
Her mind’s eye cold
Objective
All-seeing
No regard for wishes.
The Cloak.
Soaking the darkness.
Spreading the darkness.
Eating the light.
The shot
The laugh
The hard voice
The thunder of the fleeing feet
The delight of hatred on the hastily turned face
As darkness overtakes.
Shredding her life
Taking her love
Leaving her empty
Save for this.
Her fired heart
Her frigid mind.
They merge as one to produce her last wish

Now silent, she stands.
Her drape tugs at her back
She pays no heed to the sadistic wind.
She single-mindedly treads the dust.
It has no place in her mind.
The graveyard behind her
Her end and all ends ahead
The door
But a threshold of the house.
The door
The threshold between past and present
It opens.
She enters.
His weapons are in a drawer.
Another threshold.
Another boundary crossed.
You can never return.
She carries them on her hip
Gleaming metal
Once symbols of love
Reclaimed.
Symbols of vengeance
Love twisted to a dark path.
Once more into the breach
The final threshold
Between her
And the end.
It is crossed.
There is no return.
The way is shut.
It is barred.
Only what lies ahead
Is left.
She treads the dust again.
The sun sets on her
Shadows leap.
She projects her own.
She treads to the sun.
Her final task is begun.
The one known as Cloak
Has little left
Of his numbered days.