Burned

The sun shone through the hole in the dead man's hat. It'd been a clear shot that got him despite shaking hands. The bullet went true, flew through his big ogre's brow and dropped him back against the wall. She remembered the spray of blood painting the flowered moulding, the way his eyes rolled to and fro in his head, his irises expanding big and black like some old goat's.

"Ahmithy?"

The name was slurred, nearly incomprehensible. She stood there and said nothing, felt nothing, watched as his body fell and he started jigging on the floor. That jolted her out of it and the laughter bubbled up in her throat. He kept twitching the way the horse had when he'd stuck a bullet between its ears, and she laughed all the harder.

When the movement stopped she screamed, kicked him in the face and broke what was left of it. That hat, that tall proud thing, she took for herself. His blood ran down her neck as she pulled it over her brows with a grin to beat the best of them.

"I told you, you bastard," she'd whispered, pulling the money from his pockets. "I told you, I told you, I told you."

The sun shone hotter. It was on her back now, burning her real slow, a bun in an oven. The old nanny under her wheezed as it went. Sometimes it gave a pathetic buck, too broke and too gnarled to get her off of it. She'd been that way too once. Looking up at the open window as he rode her, hands beneath the pillow and squeezing it tight. He was forty three, she sixteen.

She remembered how he'd left the room once he was done. Remembered the sound of his pissing coming through that open window. She'd been too frightened to cry out of fear that he'd hear her. Mother told her she must never cry over such things.

"It's the way it goes. It's a good match. He's got the money, and we don't have room or food for you anymore."

His hand never left hers at the wedding. It gripped tight, the ring biting into her flesh, leaving marks on her palm. People cooed at how sweet it all was while he warned her not to run away with his sharp, glaring eyes.

Her skin turned red. Blister-red, creeping up her arms. She squinted through the hole in the hat.

"You're a right nasty piece of work, you are."

The sun continued shining cheerily.

"It ain't fair. None of it's fair. Why's everythin' gotta hurt so much? I ain't done nothin' to you."

A warm breeze picked up, traveled over her throat like a breath. His face leered in her mind's eye, all grizzle and moonshine-stink.

"You're barren, you little whore." His hand snapped across her cheek. "Look at me. I got myself a piss-poor dowry and a barren wife who can't bear me no children. What use are you? What use are you?"

Again came the hand. It left welts on her cheeks but no tears in her eyes. Amity was out of tears. A year went by and his hands got harder along with his drinks. She'd go to church and get the stares, the looks that spoke of whispers to come the moment her back was turned.

"My child," the preacher said one day. "I could speak to your husband. Make him see the light. Such behavior is not right in the eyes of our Lord."

Amity wanted to scream at him. Beat at his chest with her fists. YOU put me with him, she'd to say. YOU tied me to him, you and God, in front of that damned altar, and not a one of you asked me how I felt about the whole damned thing.

She smiled. "No thank you father. I'd rather you didn't."

He'd done it anyway.

Her husband beat her so hard that night she'd lost the hearing in her left ear. Amity did not go to church again.

It all broke when he killed the horse. It was a stout creature, a sweet old gelding that loved to kiss her hands with its soft lips. He'd been drunk and in one of his rages. She didn't remember the reasoning. She just saw how he grabbed that sweet thing, that sweet oblivious thing, and shot it dead.

Afterwards he stood over it. He looked surprised at first, staring down with the gun dangling in his fingers. Then the shock turned to rage and he turned it on her.

"Why'd you let me do that?!" He'd roared at her. "Why'd y'let me do that, you worthless piece of shit?"

He held the gun up against her temple, grinning like the devil. "Maybe I should do it to you. Blow out your worthless brains too, shouldn't I?"

Do it, she'd wanted to say. Yet she held her tongue, her heart fluttering in the cage of her ribs.

He struck her with it instead and left her lying there, stumbling over the dead horse and into the night.

Darkness was coming but her skin was on fire. The sun left its angry memories all over her. In the dusk she could see dust rising, horses coming. She imagined the faces of angry men meaning to hang the murderer.

Amity could feel the cold of the gun in her hand. It was a reassuring thing. The riders came closer, circled her, stared at her.

"You best come with us now, girl," said the leader in his saddle, tall and proud. "You got things to answer for."

She stared down at her hands, gripping the reins for the first time in her life, gripping the gun.

"He killed me first," she whispered. "That's the truth of it, you know. He killed me slow like the sun."

She raised the gun, and they raised theirs. But it was her own bullet that found her first.