Cowboy Girl
The city always joked the desert would return someday to burn us both down. Maybe that shit started with me. Once I killed his least favorite corner by blowing out the windows of its high-rise in feral corporate rage, cybersecurity had my name on their lips within the day. I donned a thick, techless hood and bound my breasts. I stood in a neon-cast sidestreet and asked him what might happen next.
Bruised by my desire, he spat parting words.
Ride on with a fuckin’ cowboy, Davis, he told me, Let her pick you up in the rusty outskirts and throw you bound over her nasty hummin’ steed. They’re starvin’ for girls like you out there. Just don’t you come back cryin’ to me when you’re used up.
So I did, and so the cowboy was. Copper-skulled with half her limbs born of steel and pressure joint approximations, she found me with her hands first and her eyes second in the backlot of the old garden factory grounds. There, where the land’s death first became his life among smokestack furnaces. Here, when the palm and succulent skeletons I hid between had long since withered, plucked grey with progress. The cowboy weaved her roaring steed between their corpses with a respect only desert riders build. She drew its hefty form close to me up on one wheel. She jumped and held me by the throat against the rusted fence.
“Cybercunt,” she cooed.
“I’m not one of them,” I rasped– I lied. Could you forget who you were in half an hour?
She took me in with glowing orange eyes. She hissed steam from her nostrils.
“Hold on now, Miss Davis,” she said, my name suddenly hers, too.
Girlhood gathered between my legs. I lost my breath.
“C’mon and meet the maker,” she said, “She don’t bite the real ones.”
Her gloved hand grabbed me by the collar and lugged me atop her ride. I sank into the crevice and wound my arms around her waist, where she secured me with electrified cuffs. She revved the engine of the massive thing and lurched us ahead. It rumbled to speed between our legs. Wind kicked up.
I screamed with gleeful terror, but I began to sweat in less than a mile. The city disappeared in our dust in another. An alien world whizzing by, I found many opportunities to jump, to run, to turn– at each valley we paused to circumnavigate, at every stop we made to refuel. But to be a passenger was a new beast to me. A bound freedom I’d lacked in his arms.
Thus, we rode the fuck on.
#
The others– a sea of cowboys dotted the sands, though none so shimmering and stark as the one called Alenia– threw limp lassos and kicked up dirt at me upon our arrival. Habitual hazing on that first walk around camp, dodging trash fires and fighting rings.
Corporate whore wanna feel like she matters? We seen her one thousand times before.
Alenia let them have at it until I began to cry, quietly and to what I thought was myself. The same old moment had found me again: backed into a corner, not a credit to my name, nowhere to turn but destruction without a cause. Hate with no direction. Terrorism with no statement. A choice: own it, or leave. Become Other. The easy thing, I thought, as I could not contain the sobs.
Alenia swiped the brim of her hat and turned to her folk. She said, with a confidence that I certainly had not: “Girl ain’t one of them. Let’s see.”
Silence fell over the cowboys. I cried harder, so Alenia dragged my trudging body by the wrist between crooked sandstone silhouettes.
A great pit distended the desert past that barrier. We crested a mesa to its edge. Within that billowing darkness, a gargantuan shape wriggled: thick at the spined core, tendrils and blooming buds blossoming up and out of the hole. Its roots laid deep and unseen, but it had sprouted high beyond those constraints, as if learning to walk. Their maker. My judge. I wiped tears from my cheeks and felt a new, empty sensation in my throat.
Slobbering and vast, its anticipatory hiccups shook the bulbous outer appendage I stepped on to. The thing’s temperament was apparent: a deep-set malady primed to ruin, set off by the place I had left behind. I made an initial mistake of thinking we could share this. Intoxicated, I leant and offered myself to the belly of the thing, dangling over oblivion as its gory, leafy tendrils lapped at my calves and breasts. The swarms of colour at the pit’s bottom dazzled me.
Maybe I hadn’t truly planned for anything but death on the outskirts. Most like me found it quick. The maker could’ve offered it easy, too– some wet oblivion to coalesce with. She held back. She licked my wounds but never took a chomp. She wouldn’t. I’d have to let go and fall.
I couldn’t make that choice. I was only along for the ride.
Alenia pulled me back. If she knew what I thought, she didn’t care to hint at it. The cowboys hollered and booed, put off by boredom, but on her next word I was with them now whether we all liked it or not. She wouldn’t explain how she knew it was the right call. No one asked. I dreamt of the flowers most nights thereforth.
I dreamt, any other nights, of the city. Subconscious betrayal longed for his fluorescence, his tilt. Belligerent as his hand had always been to me, a cast soul burrowed in grime at his feet, his grip held a familiar pain and a reliable enemy. Guilt wracked me for the wound I had opened in him.
Alenia’s burnt, marked-up body soothed me in her makeshift bed.
“Easy,” she said, and I knew then she’d had so many others like me before, “The big one’s coming. You got here just in time.”
#
After fortnights of watching cowboys talk up grand plans for the great return and fearing their culmination, I awoke at dawn to Alenia’s battle cry. No, wait, I considered. I did not say it. I said very little by then. Mostly, I sat in the sun and let cowboys throw rings around my neck and pick at my ailing augments and tattered city-fashion.
A convoy of cybersecurity had found the camp. Their glossy blue headlamps cast the haphazardly terraformed desert with a glow incandescent. Weapons unholstered, masks donned, they moved in for the kill.
One squad burnt the silks that hung in the entrance to Alenia’s and my chambers. The leader’s domed head, smooth and digital, quirked at my registration on his oculars. You’re coming with us, Miss. You owe.
I closed my eyes and thought: But I’m different now. Can’t you see?
In the low hum of my hindbrain, I felt the sands shift before I saw it.
They hadn’t expected the maker– to exist– to be hungry– to lumber out of its hole on coiled green legs and drag them one by one into an empty belly. Curious tentacles gorged. Bubbling acid spilled over. Altogether she spit their picked remains out, broken and stained, with a wail of not catharsis but pain. A carnivore by design, yet a sufferer by circumstance. Perhaps we shared this too– except I hadn’t eaten in days, and, unlike she, I couldn’t ever handle such a heavy meal.
Cowboys were carnivores, too. That night they roasted and filleted lean meat off leftover human bone as they drank and sang. Rank campfires rose high into the black sky, and I stumbled through hoping not to catch any orange eyes. Alenia posed atop a peachy crag, cut by shadow, tearing sinew from a clavicle. The smoky char was almost enough to ask for a bite. I begged her to take me for a ride instead. She laughed.
Still the desert looked best whizzing by in short bursts. In the hot wind on her bike once more, it was better to burn bright here than rot in shadow anyplace else. I think. I thought.
I had long since fallen to a depraved gravity that weighed heavier each time I spoke it. Each time her kiss silenced it. I let her take me again, and again, nonetheless. Thighs grinding together over the back of her idling steed, in me arose a dawning recognition. She was not here. Her hair thrown back, low cowboy groans on her lips… I was accessory to it. She might’ve done this a thousand times by herself. Once I was gone, she’d go on the same way. For it all I only lusted more. In lust, I couldn’t dread the inevitable.
“Ain’t you feel absolved?” she said.
“I do,” I lied.
“Don’t we all deserve that, girl?”
My dark eyes met her bright LEDs. She growled only just before I swooned.
The maker did not return home. I saw her shadow lugging itself across the desert in the next light of dawn.
#
But one day, I found myself scheming yesterweek, I know I’ll return to him. I’ll surmise: I’ve had my fun in the hinterlands. Let me be devoured by something more fucking palatable. But oh, distant metropolis, look down over here and tell me– does the desert give back to us who’ve taken? Has it given enough for you and I yet?
You bitch, he, livid, called to me then, You ain’t never know when the end is the end ’til it’s ended. Until red sun falls heavy over the dust-blown ridge a final time; until the lights begin to flicker and crumble inward upon their dazzling city glow. So, with that in mind, in the end, I looked her in her cowboy eyes and found her dented metal hand snaking kisses up my thigh. The fringe of her sleeve laid dormant over my lap while we consummated something under open air. Her steel cold. My burning flesh. I let her do the doing. I laid down, paralyzed with indecision.
Far off, the city ignited.
Bright pink flumes and flares cut across the stars. They blotted the darkness with a fire set to consume that built-up colossus of narcissism that nurtured me. The fifty-armed maker dragged itself, roots and all, across the desert to him. It roared with grief– with history, long overdue scores to settle. We didn’t hear sirens out here. We didn’t see bodies. What scores had I had? A tantrum he rightfully slapped me on the wrist for? A lifetime of comfortable disillusion? I was like the maker the way a gnat is like a human being. We both just stared at the same sun.
“When I met you, I realized,” Alenia said, pulling from my wanting lips, “Fuck it. Everyone there stinks the same, Miss Davis. It had to go. Thank you.”
Cowboys whooped and hollered across the valley: only earned blood soothed their desiccated throats. Until I met them, I’d never even been thirsty. I’ve got nothing due my way. I ain’t no cybercunt. I ain’t no cowboy. I’m–
“Everyone,” I replied, corroded.
Her next look was severe. Behind it, my dying city fell for good, razed by a nature he laughed at with me when we were both younger.
His flesh crusted over with mold.
His towers claimed by ravenous flowers.
His people impaled on cactus spines.
I watched. I did nothing. Again.
He and me are alike the way the sand and the dirt coexist. One dry, loose; the other, moist and chalky. Made still of the same DNA. We’re both takers. We’re both suffocators. I even know what he’d say now: ride the fuck on, babygirl. But Alenia’s my only ride, and if I’d known where she was taking me, I don’t think I would’ve jumped off even then. The lie was too good. To be something else. To leave a place behind and fight it with pre-bloodied fists, even if the cowboys did all the work and only wore me like a novelty hairpin. To convince yourself you’re part of everything when, in fact, you–
“His last babygirl now,” she said, steering me towards the maker’s hollow pit after the calamity, only tender in her brutality, “Ain’t that just how it goes.”
Atlas Redden is a Boston-based cyborg writing speculative fiction somewhere between queer erotica and surrealist macabre. They are currently developing a debut novel at UC Riverside’s Palm Desert Low-Residency MFA. Otherwise, they spend their time petting cats and railing against the ubiquitous allure of cyberspace.