Little Lady
by Sabrina Hicks
I’ve been here before, gunslinging in the bottom of a dust bowl, surrounded by prairie sprawl wrapped in a rim of mountains. I bend down, roll a handful of dirt in my sweaty palms, press the pebbles deep, catch the remnants of a bottle thrown from the corner saloon, a shard of glass I squeeze tight. The blood helps the grit stick.
I check the clock, hear it strike twelve. It’s always high noon. They call me little lady behind my back. But if they say it to my face, I liquor them up, purr in their ear, tell ’em to meet me in the center of town and when they do, they come laughing until I sink a bullet in their gut, turn their laughter into surprise, and surprised is how they die. Winner takes all. That’s what keeps me gunslinging and not dancing on a stage, tits out in a frilly dress staring into the eyes of men, or teaching children in a one room school house because I ain’t interested in being respectable and I ain’t interested in being a whore and those are the only two options in this one-horse town, so I created a third.
This man I’ve seen a hundred times before, smug and self-righteous, so sure of his place in this world before I displace him. He smiles at me. I blow him a kiss. The audience calls it the kiss of death. They love a good show, help them forget their lives for a flash, to watch and jeer before going back to their shop-keeping and banking, drinking and leaning on wooden posts with toothpicks between their teeth like they’re on a movie set because they are. We all are. The least we can do is choose our role.
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“I can’t shoot a woman,” says the man who had no problem sticking his whiskey tongue in my ear, pinching my ass as I hitched my horse to a tree last night. The same man I caught forcing himself on one of the dancers. The same man every time.
“Then this shouldn’t take long,” I say.
My younger sister found the Lord and doesn’t approve of my life choices. Tries to appeal to my softer side, but my softer side is leather not lace. She tells me I wouldn’t be able to live with myself, but I’m living just fine. I tell her maybe I had a heart a long time ago, but it’s long gone cause I feel nothing for these men I purge. She says, remember Daddy, how he tried to do right by us when Mama died. But the man I remember showed me how to quickdraw, how to clean a gun, how to stare evil in the eye and spit back. Told me I should’ve been a son. Told me it’s a man’s world, trust no one, and to hide my beauty cause it ain’t worth the trouble. Then he kicked me out saying I wasn’t welcome back unless I made something of myself.
The man before me has no interest in abiding by the rules we’d set forth: the meeting of our backs, the walking of paces, the heel toe heel toe of suspense. He wants to get right to the action, right to the moment of death and surprise, wants to know what I whisper in each of their ears as they beg for their Lord, their mama, their life. The rumors are I say, see you in hell, tell ’em a secret I don’t tell anyone, say, bang bang motherfucker.
But no matter how many times I’ve been at this, they all have the same scolded schoolboy look so I don’t vary the script. I whisper: Call me little lady one more time. And then I wait. Not one of them took me up on this offer. And this man standing before me, quietly shaking in his boots, hand going for his piece but not nearly in time, won’t either. Soon he’ll know his place.
Sabrina Hicks lives in Arizona. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Monkeybicycle, Split Lip, Fractured Lit, Milk Candy Review, and many other journals, and featured in Best Small Fictions 2021 and Wigleaf’s Top 50, 2020 and 2021. More of her work can be found at sabrinahicks.com.
