the world in a bow

The clerk returned with his rifle over one shoulder and the snake over the other, Sal perched on the outstretched glove. Eli sat on the stool up at register one, where they kept the cigarettes behind on the wall.

The clerk had, strangely, never noticed the rickety stool. They were usually not permitted. In his mind danced the myriad and beautiful possibilities of a legless veteran working after his chain of command had long ago forsaken him – a girl of morbid obesity with the most chipper and irrepressibly bright personality who lied about having ever felt a man's touch, even by accident – the devout manager's trollop of a daughter, make-up applied with a trowel and talking on her cell phone while she rang people through more slowly than every other person, and yet somehow it fell to payroll to grant her a fifty cent per hour raise following her evaluation rather than the twenty-five the others would be receiving...

The man Eli looked up at his approach, and the clerk found, for perhaps the first time, some manner of cognizance behind the gaze. The voice frail from first shouting and then days of disuse. I never had any snake before.

The clerk nodded as he returned the hooded bird to his perch atop the price display screen on the register. He flopped the dead form of the snake onto the countertop and then messed with it so the dangling end didn't drag it down off the counter completely. He laid the rifle up on the counter.

Usually comes out a little tough, but what I have found is a touch of rosemary makes it taste like lamb, and if it tastes like lamb well then it tastes awfully good to me. What I have not developed in palate during this inevitable decline of civilization, I surely have made up for in imagination.

Eli looked over the dead thing. Felled in a single shot to the head – and the rifle without a scope of any kind. He had to have been far away. Shot the horse precisely so it wouldn't explode, all in an instant – like one of those quiet types in the old movies.

I can help you clean it.

Well now well now well now. I expect I would appreciate the help.

---

They cooked it beneath the collapsed overhang of the pharmacy's drive-thru after night fell, tarps hung across the openings to keep in the heat and mask the light. The man did not smile despite the clerk's endless chatter, but he seemed to be listening at least.

They were passing a half-full bottle of Everclear back and forth – the clerk had remarked that he hadn't worked at one of these far enough out west to actually have a liquor department – and the light on the ear-bud hanging out of his coat pocket pulsed.

Eli saw the look on the clerk's face turn from one of general enjoyment to resigned annoyance, and he had the rifle up in his grip and the ear-bud plugged in. Eli surged to his feet as the clerk got up and headed toward the tent flap on the canyon side.

What's happening?

Proximity alarm. I set Sal out on clear nights to snoop – looks like he sees something he doesn't like. Keep drinking – I'll go kill it be right back.

He exited by the flap that faced the canyon so as not to allow those approaching from the other direction to see. He hunched at the edge of the collapsed overhang and peered out into the empty, featureless dark. There he saw the red speck, gyrating just slightly as Sal circled the target at an inclined, spiraling yaw.

He expected to see some suicidal nihilists on horses or at the very least a coyote – or rather not see them in the gloom until they came much closer and the bright moon illuminated them. What he did not expect to see was the white hatchback tear-assing across the flats, headed toward the stripped and falling buildings full tilt, weaving about as if it had a brick on the pedal and a monkey at the wheel.

It shrieked to a stop at the gas station. Tire squeals drifting to their ears. The sound delayed as if through water. The billboard above the station had slats falling off of it – the investment the last advertiser had made some decade ago finally coming to the end of its life. The price frozen at a hundred hillaries a gallon. The car died suddenly when it did halt. Sal's red speck hovered dutifully over a spot on the hood. They were about two hundred yards away – a shot he could make if he concentrated.

She got out of the driver's seat and immediately swatted at the red dot, as if it were maybe a fly or something. She was old – or looked it at this distance. When it became apparent it would not go away, he heard the faintest end of something she shouted at it, or at least said to it, and then she was running back and forth, back and forth, until she located the fuel nozzle. She fumbled with what could only be a credit card, jamming it into the receptacle of the gas pump that had clearly not been used since right after the towers fell. When the gas pump did nothing, she held the nozzle at the hood of the car rather than the gas tank and yanked on the trigger – when the fluid did not come forward she cursed and threw the nozzle, which ran out of slack and clunked across the hood.

The clerk became aware of the man Eli hunkered down next to him, casting his eyes out at the same spectacle. A younger girl, hair down to her waist and all fluttering in her movement, clambering out of the car and rushing to the side of the elder, putting her hands around the stooped form and coaxing her into the car.

Eli whispered, even though there was clearly no danger of them hearing. What are you going to do?

The clerk watched as the car gigged forward before dying again, then shakily rumbled across the the flats toward them, its headlights falling upon them. He rested the rifle across one shoulder and sighed.

Same thing I always do despite every urge to the contrary – not kill anybody, probably.

It was embarrassingly apparent that the old woman didn't know how to shift out of first gear. When she did finally skid to a stop and the engine died, the clerk did not move despite Eli's instinctive retreat.

She was grey and missing an eye, dressed in enough clothes to make an Eskimo feel stifled. She paced back and forth in front of him as the sheepish young girl with the unbelievably long black hair stared fearfully at the guns.

The old woman stopped an arm's length away from the clerk.

Well? You gonna offer us food?

The clerk smiled.

Madame, I'm going to offer you the world in a bow.