“Rattlesnakes”
by Sabrina Hicks
I need to set the record straight—I’m no killer. Arsonist or thief is fair. But killer ain’t. Though to be honest, I’ve been known to dance on a grave or two on account of who’s doing the dying. But right hand to God, Cyrus was the one who came up with the suicide pact. He just assumed I’d follow on account of his inflated sense of himself.
The debt and bankruptcy—that’s on him. I wasn’t gonna off myself because of his delinquencies. Any woman worth her salt knows you can fix a man’s haircut but you can’t fix his soul. His addictions got us into that mess, the worst of ‘em being the gambling. He said there was no sense in being a spectator without having some skin in the game. Problem was he was skin-deep in grift since the day he was born. Mama always said crazy don’t show itself for at least a few months, but Cyrus maintained a false sense of sanity for a year. He was the kind of liar who believed his own lies, which is a level of deception that’s harder to root out.
It’d been a particularly rough week of creditors, collectors, a hitman with a heart, who gave him one more day to come up with a sum neither of ‘em would see, and a foreclosure notice on the little house his daddy left him, when he decided it was game over. Then he made a case for shootin’ ourselves like we was Romeo and Juliet. But it wasn’t like we were married. I’d only been running with him just over a year.
“Darlin’,” I offered, “how ‘bout I use my gun, you use yours, and we count to three? That way the blood stays on our own hands. Heaven being heaven an’ all. More of an argument at the pearly gates. Though I’m fairly certain there’s a verse in the good book frownin’ on any part of this.”
“Clementine, you gotta point.”
Now depending on how much time you spent roped around the bible belt, you wouldn’t believe, but that man considered himself a man of God.
“And if you go first, babe, I’ll pray for your soul,” I said.
He nodded. “You’re a good woman.”
I nodded back, knowing I had no intention of doing such a thing and no intention of joining his ass. Though I felt twice my age, I’d only spent eighteen years on this earth, all under the thumb of someone else, and I’d finally reached the age of independence. Cyrus on the other hand had at least ten years on me, though he was cagey about his exact age. He was never good at countin’, let alone reading women. He killed himself on four.
We sat in his pink bathtub, me in between his legs like spoons staring at the moldy grout because he didn’t wanna leave a mess for his sister who’d be the first to come by. Awfully gracious of him if you ask me. When I heard his gun go off I lowered mine and took a long, deep breath. I didn’t look back but he never said, Hey babe, you’re supposed to fire, too, so I assumed he was good and dead. I sat there frozen, feeling the heat of his blood run down my back and around my legs like I was filling up a warm bath.
For some reason it seemed like I’d given birth sitting there in all that blood. I got on a bit of a laughing tangent, which makes me sound like a real lunatic but you have to understand, when I get into uncomfortable situations, my wiring is off. I did all my cryin’ before Mama died and then that salty spicket inside me got swapped out for laughter. My foster daddy said I was well run dry with only rattlesnakes at the bottom. I lost Mama at eleven, never had a Pa, and was thrown into the state of Wyoming’s foster care system where I slept with a switchblade I traded for things I’m ashamed to say now. But when you sleep with one eye open, it’s always better knowing you can gut a pig when you find one on top of you squealing. Bein’ sweet was never a luxury I could afford.
I’m not sure how long I sat there in that warm bath. I leaned back into Cy’s chest, wrapped his thick arms around me and felt a calm that almost felt like love, like I was drownin’ in rose petals, though I know love is the wrong word. More like comin’ up for air in a lake of weeds and undertow. When I finally came around, I showered and got to work cleanin’. I knew Cyrus had a garage full of diesel and turpentine. His body reeked of the stuff from working on his old truck. I told him, if I lit my cigarettes too close he’d burst into flames.
Didn’t take much to burn that tinderbox. I didn’t think how it might look to the cops until I was out of Afton heading to Dally’s in Smoot. I wasn’t so good at thinkin’ ahead, but I figured forensics would see the man took his own life like in them cop shows. Only the fire was my idea at that point. Growin’ up we had burn barrels. No sanitation workers came to the farm. Can’t fault a woman for good housekeeping.
At first, Dally wasn’t too keen on me showing up, but I needed some money and company.
“Clementine, you’re about to become a fugitive.”
“Been everything else,” I said. “May as well be that.”
“Yeah, but you’re about to make me an accomplice.”
“Dally, that man you got in that trailer ain’t no better than the one I hitched my wagon to. And even then, I’d argue mine was a hell of a lot better.”
“Kyle’s at work right now,” she said, as if she was arguing details.
To be honest, I knew it wouldn’t take much to convince her to leave. Dally had a pregnancy that took a few months ago before Kyle knocked her on her ass and she miscarried. She was what the guys called a looker so I wasn’t sure why she thought Kyle was the best life had to offer. Maybe it’d be easier if we got a choice of parents and childhoods. Dally was another foster kid in a broke town, which meant folks that got her needed the state check way more than they needed another mouth to feed. Meanest bunch of church-goers I’d even seen, so I couldn’t be too hard on Dally for her choices.
“You ever seen that movie Thelma and Louise?”
“Course I have,” she said, one hand on her skinny waist, finally coming off the stoop of her trailer.
“Well, you can be Thelma and I’ll be Louise. Or if you want, you be Louise and I’ll be Thelma cause I can’t remember which one was which and neither of us has red hair.”
“You know they both died.”
I looked at the encroachment of brush around the falling apart trailer, the 100-foot patch of dirt with a firepit at the center and beer cans littering the yard like lawn trolls.
“Darlin’, we’re all dying,” I said. “Just a matter of timing. Hell, I almost died today. There was a good chance Cyrus would’ve changed the plan and shot me first.”
She couldn’t argue with that logic.
“Clementine and Dally. Dally and Clementine,” she said, trying out titles while looking up at the sky. It was June in Wyoming. Warm and balmy and smelling of Rocky Mountain juniper. She spoke to the thin clouds, “Doesn’t have the same ring.”
“You’re goddamn right it does! Got even a better ring. You listen here, Dally. You got two choices. You can walk back in there and wait for Kyle to drink himself into a blind rage and treat you like a rag doll, or you walk out on his ass before he puts his vile seed in you again and got a hold of you for the remainder of that kid’s life if he don’t kill you first. These hick towns ain’t no place for a woman needing options! I’m heading to Phoenix, crashing at my cousin’s until I figure things out. She’ll take you in too. She rescues animals all the time. Couple of strays like us can’t be any different.”
That seemed to shake her up, so I thought I’d strike. “How much cash you got?”
A slow smile slid across her face. “Kyle’s got a secret stash somewhere in case of emergencies.”
I grinned back at her. She was warming up to the idea faster than I’d predicted.
“Well, I say this is an emergency.”
I followed her into the trailer and we scoured the place, looking behind every shit stained cushion and questionable lump of laundry until I started thinking like that bastard. Few things I knew about Kyle: he liked to drink, he liked to slap around the ladies, and he sure did like his TV shows.
“You got any loose floorboards or soft spots in the plywood? Those Hollywood scripts always have their characters squirreling away cash in carpentry.”
Sure enough it was behind the toilet in the wall. “Not a stretch for a man who likes to sit on the can,” I said. Dally was really onboard when she saw that wad of cash, coming up with a list of dumb shit he did that week, thinking of the places she never saw, or the things she never did. She was kneeling beside me, counting twenties on the piss stained linoleum. Man, his aim was bad. I held my nose trying to figure how far we’d get with $520 dollars.
“Pretty good for that cheap bastard. If Cy came across this stash, he wouldn’t even make it to the front door without placing a bet on how many squares left on your toilet paper roll.”
“I feel like we should go to Mexico,” she said.
“Nah, that’s suspect. Everyone knows you only go to Mexico when you kill someone.”
She gave me a look like she didn’t believe I didn’t kill Cyrus. I sighed and said, “Now why would I kill a man who had death stalking his every move? I’m no fool. Was only a matter of time.”
“Okay, but if we’re doing this we gotta go to the Grand Canyon like Thelma and Louise. Not to die or nothing. Just I’ve never seen it and I’ve always wanted to go and Kyle never took me.”
“Then, Dally, that’s where we’re going,” I said. “It’s around ten hours to northern Arizona. We check out the canyon, then head down to Phoenix, which is another four hours. I’ll drive, you DJ, but it has to be old tunes. I can’t stomach what passes for country these days.”
We hit the 89 South after putting together bags of food, water, and clothing. Somewhere behind us was the smoke from the fire I’d started and it was only a matter of time before someone came looking for Cy’s truck. We drove the border of Idaho before hitting Utah when I started to believe I’d thrown Dally a lifeline the way she was comin’ up with ideas of where we oughta go. She’d had all sorts of dreams stashed inside her that came spilling out on the highway. I told her with a face like hers, she should take her chances in LA, though even as I said it I realized I sounded like Cyrus, suggesting fanciful ideas. I was fairly certain Hollywood was crowded with pretty faced girls ditching their small town roots.
I wasn’t interested in that frivolousness so I didn’t quite know. But it made Dally into a new woman and I liked seeing her giddy with options. We stopped for gas and littered the cab with corn nuts, beef jerky, Bazooka bubblegum (her choice), Big Hunks (mine), and Red Bull to stay awake. We peeled off twenties from Kyle’s wad of cash cackling like two schoolgirls, singing along to June Carter and Johnny Cash. I was feeling right as rain having Dally beside me.
“Nothing like driving an open highway to feel the rush of possibilities,” I said, chewing on my Big Hunk.
“What do you think Kyle’s doing right now?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care.” I looked over at Dally for a gut check. “Don’t be thinking about him. Time you thought about yourself. When’s the last time you did that?”
Apparently, Dally wasn’t a dry well like me. She started crying.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “There’s no worse a man out there than one who raises his hand to a woman. No part of you should grieve for him or think you was responsible. It’s a cancer of what I call the little man, and it only grows back if you think you can carve it out.”
She nodded and wiped her eyes. It was nighttime and the highway shrunk to our cast of headlights. Traffic was light and the mood changed as it does in evening. Maybe we were coming off our sugar high, but I felt we were outrunning some consequences that were gaining speed, and I kept checking the rearview mirror. It seemed, too, Dally needed some reassurances which required an amount of softening I wasn’t accustomed to.
“It’s hard to see now in the dark, but we’re almost there,” I said. “And around us, Dally, this land we’re pushing through has stories, but we’re the ones holding the script. That’s what the open road provides. Livin’ on our own terms!”
We hit the Grand Canyon late at night and slept in the car. When the sun rose, we saw the red rock light up and deepen into the canyon and we got out to walk the rim.
Now, I know everyone says the Grand Canyon can’t be captured in photos and paintings, and maybe even words, but what I saw I wasn’t prepared for. It’s like a secret pact happens between your heart and your eyes, opening something so deep inside you, you didn’t know it was there in the first place. Dally was hiking down to a lower spot off the road, toward a ledge that gave a 180-degree view, and I slowly followed her taking in the vastness of the land. Each layer of sediment ran like rivers in the canyon wall, veins of all the sunrises and sunsets that happened in the West—ones never captured or maybe even seen except for in those pages of rock.
Deep below us was the Colorado River running aqua colored and jagged like a scar. I sat next to Dally watching the sun shape the mesas, shifting the rock sculptures, dotting the landscape. There were trees growing in the damnedest places, too, leaning out from the edges, roots prying through stone and spilling out like entrails. The wind gave them enough movement to look like they were risking it all being that close. That they believed their leaves were wings if only their roots would give. We sat there a good long time before Dally broke the silence.
“We’re just a couple of rattlesnakes,” Dally said, hugging her knees.
Maybe for the first time, I looked at Dally. She’d be easy to dismiss as just another pretty face, but faces are deceitful. She closed her eyes and laid back with her hands behind her head.
“Rattlesnakes are just out there minding their business, not trying to hurt no one, finding food to eat and rocks to sun on,” she said. “They even rattle a warning or two but some people think snakes should die just for being snakes, for being who they are. When, really, they just want to go on living, same as you and me, only striking cause they’ve been pushed too far. You know they sense things before anyone else?”
I lay next to Dally in the crook of her arm the way I used to with Mama before she got in that vehicle and crashed on the interstate. I was in sixth grade, Ms. Sawyer’s class, when I was told to go to the office. I remember the smell of paint on my fingers. I kept trying to rub the colors off when I got the news. The principal was waiting for me to cry, but I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine her not coming home. I couldn’t imagine a world I wanted to live in without her, so I didn’t. Crying meant she was gone.
Dally pulled me in tight and rested her cheek on my head. “You know what I mean, Clemie? ‘Bout rattlesnakes? Kyle killed one the other day. Wasn’t anywhere near our trailer. It was moving along the brush, but Kyle couldn’t let it go. Kept saying it would be back as if it was vengeful. He stalked it with a shovel and smashed its head until you couldn’t tell it was anything but a stain in dirt. I was so mad I cried. I cried and couldn’t stop. Got Kyle so angry. He accused me of caring more about that old snake than losing our own baby.”
I brushed away Dally’s hair blowing in my face, feeling something grow inside me.
“The thing is, he was right. I never shed a tear over that miscarriage. What does that make me?”
“Makes you human,” I said, feeling that something inside me rise to my skin and dislodge in my chest. Dally must’ve felt it too. She gripped me even tighter, holding on to me like she was the roots and I was one of those trees on the edge. “I believe that snake was trying to warn you, Dally.”
Maybe it was all that beauty, open and exposed. The land flat on each side until you stumble upon this secret so massive in scale it seems unreal. But it’s real. It was there before us and it would be there after. Only thing brief was our silly lives. I began crying being around so much beauty, like that paint on my hands had never come off until then, sliding down my fingertips, bleeding into river and rock, into dawn and dusk. Because there was joy in that cry too, and maybe that’s what hurt the most, the fact that I dared to still care about something that held no shape until that moment. Maybe I was even crying for Cyrus, who’d never see what the world was capable of, for the moments in bed lying next to him when he was just a boy with dreams too big for his body. And when the cops came and called down to me and Dally, we didn’t move. We lay there holding on to one another. We didn’t launch ourselves off the cliff like in the movies. We weren’t Thelma and Louise. We were Dally and Clementine. Clementine and Dally.
Sabrina Hicks lives in Arizona with her family. Her work has appeared in Cowboy Jamboree, Cleaver, Reckon Review, Split Lip Magazine, Best Small Fictions and Best Micro Fiction anthologies, Wigleaf’s Top 50, as well as numerous journals, both online and in print. More of her stories can be found at sabrinahicks.com.
by Sabrina Hicks
I need to set the record straight—I’m no killer. Arsonist or thief is fair. But killer ain’t. Though to be honest, I’ve been known to dance on a grave or two on account of who’s doing the dying. But right hand to God, Cyrus was the one who came up with the suicide pact. He just assumed I’d follow on account of his inflated sense of himself.
The debt and bankruptcy—that’s on him. I wasn’t gonna off myself because of his delinquencies. Any woman worth her salt knows you can fix a man’s haircut but you can’t fix his soul. His addictions got us into that mess, the worst of ‘em being the gambling. He said there was no sense in being a spectator without having some skin in the game. Problem was he was skin-deep in grift since the day he was born. Mama always said crazy don’t show itself for at least a few months, but Cyrus maintained a false sense of sanity for a year. He was the kind of liar who believed his own lies, which is a level of deception that’s harder to root out.
It’d been a particularly rough week of creditors, collectors, a hitman with a heart, who gave him one more day to come up with a sum neither of ‘em would see, and a foreclosure notice on the little house his daddy left him, when he decided it was game over. Then he made a case for shootin’ ourselves like we was Romeo and Juliet. But it wasn’t like we were married. I’d only been running with him just over a year.
“Darlin’,” I offered, “how ‘bout I use my gun, you use yours, and we count to three? That way the blood stays on our own hands. Heaven being heaven an’ all. More of an argument at the pearly gates. Though I’m fairly certain there’s a verse in the good book frownin’ on any part of this.”
“Clementine, you gotta point.”
Now depending on how much time you spent roped around the bible belt, you wouldn’t believe, but that man considered himself a man of God.
“And if you go first, babe, I’ll pray for your soul,” I said.
He nodded. “You’re a good woman.”
I nodded back, knowing I had no intention of doing such a thing and no intention of joining his ass. Though I felt twice my age, I’d only spent eighteen years on this earth, all under the thumb of someone else, and I’d finally reached the age of independence. Cyrus on the other hand had at least ten years on me, though he was cagey about his exact age. He was never good at countin’, let alone reading women. He killed himself on four.
We sat in his pink bathtub, me in between his legs like spoons staring at the moldy grout because he didn’t wanna leave a mess for his sister who’d be the first to come by. Awfully gracious of him if you ask me. When I heard his gun go off I lowered mine and took a long, deep breath. I didn’t look back but he never said, Hey babe, you’re supposed to fire, too, so I assumed he was good and dead. I sat there frozen, feeling the heat of his blood run down my back and around my legs like I was filling up a warm bath.
For some reason it seemed like I’d given birth sitting there in all that blood. I got on a bit of a laughing tangent, which makes me sound like a real lunatic but you have to understand, when I get into uncomfortable situations, my wiring is off. I did all my cryin’ before Mama died and then that salty spicket inside me got swapped out for laughter. My foster daddy said I was well run dry with only rattlesnakes at the bottom. I lost Mama at eleven, never had a Pa, and was thrown into the state of Wyoming’s foster care system where I slept with a switchblade I traded for things I’m ashamed to say now. But when you sleep with one eye open, it’s always better knowing you can gut a pig when you find one on top of you squealing. Bein’ sweet was never a luxury I could afford.
I’m not sure how long I sat there in that warm bath. I leaned back into Cy’s chest, wrapped his thick arms around me and felt a calm that almost felt like love, like I was drownin’ in rose petals, though I know love is the wrong word. More like comin’ up for air in a lake of weeds and undertow. When I finally came around, I showered and got to work cleanin’. I knew Cyrus had a garage full of diesel and turpentine. His body reeked of the stuff from working on his old truck. I told him, if I lit my cigarettes too close he’d burst into flames.
Didn’t take much to burn that tinderbox. I didn’t think how it might look to the cops until I was out of Afton heading to Dally’s in Smoot. I wasn’t so good at thinkin’ ahead, but I figured forensics would see the man took his own life like in them cop shows. Only the fire was my idea at that point. Growin’ up we had burn barrels. No sanitation workers came to the farm. Can’t fault a woman for good housekeeping.
At first, Dally wasn’t too keen on me showing up, but I needed some money and company.
“Clementine, you’re about to become a fugitive.”
“Been everything else,” I said. “May as well be that.”
“Yeah, but you’re about to make me an accomplice.”
“Dally, that man you got in that trailer ain’t no better than the one I hitched my wagon to. And even then, I’d argue mine was a hell of a lot better.”
“Kyle’s at work right now,” she said, as if she was arguing details.
To be honest, I knew it wouldn’t take much to convince her to leave. Dally had a pregnancy that took a few months ago before Kyle knocked her on her ass and she miscarried. She was what the guys called a looker so I wasn’t sure why she thought Kyle was the best life had to offer. Maybe it’d be easier if we got a choice of parents and childhoods. Dally was another foster kid in a broke town, which meant folks that got her needed the state check way more than they needed another mouth to feed. Meanest bunch of church-goers I’d even seen, so I couldn’t be too hard on Dally for her choices.
“You ever seen that movie Thelma and Louise?”
“Course I have,” she said, one hand on her skinny waist, finally coming off the stoop of her trailer.
“Well, you can be Thelma and I’ll be Louise. Or if you want, you be Louise and I’ll be Thelma cause I can’t remember which one was which and neither of us has red hair.”
“You know they both died.”
I looked at the encroachment of brush around the falling apart trailer, the 100-foot patch of dirt with a firepit at the center and beer cans littering the yard like lawn trolls.
“Darlin’, we’re all dying,” I said. “Just a matter of timing. Hell, I almost died today. There was a good chance Cyrus would’ve changed the plan and shot me first.”
She couldn’t argue with that logic.
“Clementine and Dally. Dally and Clementine,” she said, trying out titles while looking up at the sky. It was June in Wyoming. Warm and balmy and smelling of Rocky Mountain juniper. She spoke to the thin clouds, “Doesn’t have the same ring.”
“You’re goddamn right it does! Got even a better ring. You listen here, Dally. You got two choices. You can walk back in there and wait for Kyle to drink himself into a blind rage and treat you like a rag doll, or you walk out on his ass before he puts his vile seed in you again and got a hold of you for the remainder of that kid’s life if he don’t kill you first. These hick towns ain’t no place for a woman needing options! I’m heading to Phoenix, crashing at my cousin’s until I figure things out. She’ll take you in too. She rescues animals all the time. Couple of strays like us can’t be any different.”
That seemed to shake her up, so I thought I’d strike. “How much cash you got?”
A slow smile slid across her face. “Kyle’s got a secret stash somewhere in case of emergencies.”
I grinned back at her. She was warming up to the idea faster than I’d predicted.
“Well, I say this is an emergency.”
I followed her into the trailer and we scoured the place, looking behind every shit stained cushion and questionable lump of laundry until I started thinking like that bastard. Few things I knew about Kyle: he liked to drink, he liked to slap around the ladies, and he sure did like his TV shows.
“You got any loose floorboards or soft spots in the plywood? Those Hollywood scripts always have their characters squirreling away cash in carpentry.”
Sure enough it was behind the toilet in the wall. “Not a stretch for a man who likes to sit on the can,” I said. Dally was really onboard when she saw that wad of cash, coming up with a list of dumb shit he did that week, thinking of the places she never saw, or the things she never did. She was kneeling beside me, counting twenties on the piss stained linoleum. Man, his aim was bad. I held my nose trying to figure how far we’d get with $520 dollars.
“Pretty good for that cheap bastard. If Cy came across this stash, he wouldn’t even make it to the front door without placing a bet on how many squares left on your toilet paper roll.”
“I feel like we should go to Mexico,” she said.
“Nah, that’s suspect. Everyone knows you only go to Mexico when you kill someone.”
She gave me a look like she didn’t believe I didn’t kill Cyrus. I sighed and said, “Now why would I kill a man who had death stalking his every move? I’m no fool. Was only a matter of time.”
“Okay, but if we’re doing this we gotta go to the Grand Canyon like Thelma and Louise. Not to die or nothing. Just I’ve never seen it and I’ve always wanted to go and Kyle never took me.”
“Then, Dally, that’s where we’re going,” I said. “It’s around ten hours to northern Arizona. We check out the canyon, then head down to Phoenix, which is another four hours. I’ll drive, you DJ, but it has to be old tunes. I can’t stomach what passes for country these days.”
We hit the 89 South after putting together bags of food, water, and clothing. Somewhere behind us was the smoke from the fire I’d started and it was only a matter of time before someone came looking for Cy’s truck. We drove the border of Idaho before hitting Utah when I started to believe I’d thrown Dally a lifeline the way she was comin’ up with ideas of where we oughta go. She’d had all sorts of dreams stashed inside her that came spilling out on the highway. I told her with a face like hers, she should take her chances in LA, though even as I said it I realized I sounded like Cyrus, suggesting fanciful ideas. I was fairly certain Hollywood was crowded with pretty faced girls ditching their small town roots.
I wasn’t interested in that frivolousness so I didn’t quite know. But it made Dally into a new woman and I liked seeing her giddy with options. We stopped for gas and littered the cab with corn nuts, beef jerky, Bazooka bubblegum (her choice), Big Hunks (mine), and Red Bull to stay awake. We peeled off twenties from Kyle’s wad of cash cackling like two schoolgirls, singing along to June Carter and Johnny Cash. I was feeling right as rain having Dally beside me.
“Nothing like driving an open highway to feel the rush of possibilities,” I said, chewing on my Big Hunk.
“What do you think Kyle’s doing right now?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care.” I looked over at Dally for a gut check. “Don’t be thinking about him. Time you thought about yourself. When’s the last time you did that?”
Apparently, Dally wasn’t a dry well like me. She started crying.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “There’s no worse a man out there than one who raises his hand to a woman. No part of you should grieve for him or think you was responsible. It’s a cancer of what I call the little man, and it only grows back if you think you can carve it out.”
She nodded and wiped her eyes. It was nighttime and the highway shrunk to our cast of headlights. Traffic was light and the mood changed as it does in evening. Maybe we were coming off our sugar high, but I felt we were outrunning some consequences that were gaining speed, and I kept checking the rearview mirror. It seemed, too, Dally needed some reassurances which required an amount of softening I wasn’t accustomed to.
“It’s hard to see now in the dark, but we’re almost there,” I said. “And around us, Dally, this land we’re pushing through has stories, but we’re the ones holding the script. That’s what the open road provides. Livin’ on our own terms!”
We hit the Grand Canyon late at night and slept in the car. When the sun rose, we saw the red rock light up and deepen into the canyon and we got out to walk the rim.
Now, I know everyone says the Grand Canyon can’t be captured in photos and paintings, and maybe even words, but what I saw I wasn’t prepared for. It’s like a secret pact happens between your heart and your eyes, opening something so deep inside you, you didn’t know it was there in the first place. Dally was hiking down to a lower spot off the road, toward a ledge that gave a 180-degree view, and I slowly followed her taking in the vastness of the land. Each layer of sediment ran like rivers in the canyon wall, veins of all the sunrises and sunsets that happened in the West—ones never captured or maybe even seen except for in those pages of rock.
Deep below us was the Colorado River running aqua colored and jagged like a scar. I sat next to Dally watching the sun shape the mesas, shifting the rock sculptures, dotting the landscape. There were trees growing in the damnedest places, too, leaning out from the edges, roots prying through stone and spilling out like entrails. The wind gave them enough movement to look like they were risking it all being that close. That they believed their leaves were wings if only their roots would give. We sat there a good long time before Dally broke the silence.
“We’re just a couple of rattlesnakes,” Dally said, hugging her knees.
Maybe for the first time, I looked at Dally. She’d be easy to dismiss as just another pretty face, but faces are deceitful. She closed her eyes and laid back with her hands behind her head.
“Rattlesnakes are just out there minding their business, not trying to hurt no one, finding food to eat and rocks to sun on,” she said. “They even rattle a warning or two but some people think snakes should die just for being snakes, for being who they are. When, really, they just want to go on living, same as you and me, only striking cause they’ve been pushed too far. You know they sense things before anyone else?”
I lay next to Dally in the crook of her arm the way I used to with Mama before she got in that vehicle and crashed on the interstate. I was in sixth grade, Ms. Sawyer’s class, when I was told to go to the office. I remember the smell of paint on my fingers. I kept trying to rub the colors off when I got the news. The principal was waiting for me to cry, but I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine her not coming home. I couldn’t imagine a world I wanted to live in without her, so I didn’t. Crying meant she was gone.
Dally pulled me in tight and rested her cheek on my head. “You know what I mean, Clemie? ‘Bout rattlesnakes? Kyle killed one the other day. Wasn’t anywhere near our trailer. It was moving along the brush, but Kyle couldn’t let it go. Kept saying it would be back as if it was vengeful. He stalked it with a shovel and smashed its head until you couldn’t tell it was anything but a stain in dirt. I was so mad I cried. I cried and couldn’t stop. Got Kyle so angry. He accused me of caring more about that old snake than losing our own baby.”
I brushed away Dally’s hair blowing in my face, feeling something grow inside me.
“The thing is, he was right. I never shed a tear over that miscarriage. What does that make me?”
“Makes you human,” I said, feeling that something inside me rise to my skin and dislodge in my chest. Dally must’ve felt it too. She gripped me even tighter, holding on to me like she was the roots and I was one of those trees on the edge. “I believe that snake was trying to warn you, Dally.”
Maybe it was all that beauty, open and exposed. The land flat on each side until you stumble upon this secret so massive in scale it seems unreal. But it’s real. It was there before us and it would be there after. Only thing brief was our silly lives. I began crying being around so much beauty, like that paint on my hands had never come off until then, sliding down my fingertips, bleeding into river and rock, into dawn and dusk. Because there was joy in that cry too, and maybe that’s what hurt the most, the fact that I dared to still care about something that held no shape until that moment. Maybe I was even crying for Cyrus, who’d never see what the world was capable of, for the moments in bed lying next to him when he was just a boy with dreams too big for his body. And when the cops came and called down to me and Dally, we didn’t move. We lay there holding on to one another. We didn’t launch ourselves off the cliff like in the movies. We weren’t Thelma and Louise. We were Dally and Clementine. Clementine and Dally.
Sabrina Hicks lives in Arizona with her family. Her work has appeared in Cowboy Jamboree, Cleaver, Reckon Review, Split Lip Magazine, Best Small Fictions and Best Micro Fiction anthologies, Wigleaf’s Top 50, as well as numerous journals, both online and in print. More of her stories can be found at sabrinahicks.com.