the misfit west

Tag: short-story

  • hookups

    The camper sat where things went to disappear. Not hidden—just off to the side, behind cottonwoods that never thickened. Wind moved through them like it had permission.

    It had once been a camper. That was the rumor. He’d stripped it down and rebuilt it without finishing anything. Walls opened into nothing. Wires crossed where shelves used to be. Plywood met plywood and didn’t line up.

    Nothing had a final form.

    A rearview mirror was screwed into the bathroom wall. Crooked. Beneath it, a hose hung loose, looping into a plastic bin. The bin held water when it felt like it. The floor dipped there. I learned where not to stand.

    There were hookups—electric, water—but they felt provisional. Like a favor that could be revoked mid-sentence. I kept waiting for a sound that would mean the whole place had decided to quit pretending.

    We were cleaning.

    Cleaning meant shifting objects so the floor could be seen briefly. Tools without pairs. Screws loose in mugs. Ash in places ash didn’t belong. Old food bags folded small, like they were trying to behave.

    I wiped the counters. The surface was already ruined, but I wiped anyway. Habit. A way to keep my hands occupied.

    The air carried a sharp, sour heat. Chemical. Burnt. The microwave was plugged into an extension cord that ran under the door. I noticed that and filed it away. I noticed a lot of things and didn’t say them.

    I had moved in because there was nowhere else.

    That wasn’t a confession. It was a fact, like the wiring.

    I slept dressed. Shoes stayed by the door. My bag stayed zipped. I learned how to move through the space without brushing against too much. When I stood still, the place felt unstable—not collapsing, just waiting.

    He moved easily inside it. Like it made sense. Like this was how things were supposed to be arranged.

    The microwave light clicked on.

    My phone turned slowly behind the glass. Once. Again.

    The sound was ordinary. That was the problem. The low hum, the small motor doing its job. The room didn’t react. Nothing tipped. Nothing cracked.

    Outside, a truck passed. Gravel shifted. Then it was gone.

    The smell changed quickly—hot plastic, something metallic, bitter at the back of the throat. The microwave kept going.

    He stood close. Close enough that I could smell old coffee on his breath. Close enough that I didn’t step back.

    I watched the phone spin. I watched the time pass without numbers.

    When it stopped, the room stayed the same. Counters. Floor. Mirror. Hose.

    Later—much later—the smells started showing up in other places. Bleach. Ozone. Warm dust. Appliances made me pause. The sound of fans stayed too long in my ears.

    I cleaned more carefully after that. Slower. As if moving wrong might wake something.

    Time passed the way it does when nothing interrupts it. Days stacked. Nights folded in on themselves. I learned which boards flexed and which held. I learned which silences were normal.

    When I left, I didn’t take much. The phone was already gone.

    Sometimes now, a microwave hum will catch me off guard. Not fear—just attention. The way the body keeps a list it never shows you.

    The West likes things that look unfinished. It mistakes exposure for toughness. It calls improvisation resilience.

    The camper is still there. I drive past it sometimes. The cottonwoods haven’t filled in.

    I don’t stop.

    Morning came without fixing anything.

    I drove into town with the windows down even though it was cold. My phone was useless now—hot, warped, wrong—but I carried it anyway. Habit. Proof. I parked at Jack’s Liquor because it was open and because I didn’t know where else to go.

    Inside, the floor was sticky in the way liquor store floors are. Bottles stacked too high. Fluorescent light that made everyone look unfinished. I asked about a phone. The man behind the counter shrugged. Not unkind. Not helpful.

    Outside, the wind pushed at my back like it wanted me gone too.

    When I drove back, my things were already in the yard.

    Clothes. A bag split open. Papers lifting and dropping like they couldn’t decide what mattered. Nothing broken. Nothing arranged. Just displaced.

    Something in me went loud.

    I don’t remember deciding to scream. It was already happening by the time I crossed the line where the yard turned into dirt. My throat opened and didn’t close again. Sound without shape. Sound that didn’t care who heard it.

    The motorcycle was leaned on its kickstand near the camper.

    Black. Heavy. Too confident in itself.

    I didn’t think about it. I put my shoulder into the metal and used everything I had—legs, back, the stored-up effort of not asking for help, of sleeping dressed, of waiting for things to fail. It tipped slower than I wanted, then faster, then it was down.

    The sound it made was final.

    I went inside still screaming.

    The back area where the bed was cut off from the rest of the space by a half-wall that didn’t reach the ceiling. Light pooled there differently. Dimmer. Closer.

    That’s where he was.

    He reached down and brought up a sawed-off shotgun like it had been waiting. Short. Unreasonable. Pointed directly at my face.

    I didn’t stop.

    I didn’t flinch. I didn’t step back.

    The screaming narrowed into words I didn’t recognize as mine until they were already gone.

    The gun stayed where it was. His hands moved, then didn’t. The room held its breath. I don’t remember the sound of it leaving, only the door.

    After, the space felt emptied out. Not safe. Just abandoned.

    I took the change from a cup by the bed. Quarters, nickels, whatever fit in my pocket. I found a small bottle of whiskey tangled in the sheets. I took that too.

    Outside, the motorcycle was still on its side. My clothes were still in the yard. The wind was still doing its job.

    I didn’t stay to clean.

    ____________________________________________

    ⚠️ Reader Support & Content Notice

    This essay includes reflections on experiences of coercive control, isolation, and intimate partner harm that some readers may find emotionally intense, distressing, or triggering. If you are currently in a situation where you feel unsafe, coerced, or under threat — or if this writing brings up past trauma — know this without sugar-coating: your safety matters more than anyone’s story.

    You don’t have to endure harm alone.

    If you are in immediate danger:

    📞 Call 911 (U.S.) right now — your life and wellbeing are priority one.

    National and Confidential Support (U.S.):

    📞 The National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 or Text START to 88788 — 24/7 confidential support, safety planning, and referrals to shelters and advocates near you.

    💬 RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 800-656-HOPE (4673) or online chat/text options — trained listeners available 24/7.

    Find Local Help:

    🏠 DomesticShelters.org — searchable directory of shelters and support programs across the U.S.

    Emotional and Mental Health Support:

    📘 To Write Love On Her Arms (TWLOHA) — hope and connection for people struggling with depression, trauma, or crisis.

    💛 Reach out to a trusted therapist, counselor, or mental health provider who uses trauma-informed care principles, which recognize how power, fear, and control shape survival responses.

    If you’re supporting someone else:

    Listen without judgment, believe what they tell you, and help them connect to professional resources at their pace.

    You deserve support and safety. If this piece resonates, take a breath — and take the next step toward care that feels right for you.

  • hair on the wire

    The pronghorn were already gathering along the fence line when the wind shifted—tight, jerking movements like something had startled them miles before I ever arrived. Wyoming wind always brings news too early; it ruins surprises. It carries the scent of death the way a river carries silt: efficiently, without apology.

    I pulled over on the shoulder, gravel giving under the tires. Out on the basin, the animals held themselves in that half-lit alertness, the twilight hour where everything is both alive and almost gone. Their bodies twitched: a muscle memory from predators that don’t exist anymore. American cheetahs, long-toothed cats, those fast ghosts that evolution built them for. Creatures so fast their shadows must’ve cracked like whips across the old grasslands.

    None of those predators survived.

    The pronghorn did.

    That’s the punchline.

    Scientists say pronghorn run fifty-five miles per hour because their bodies still believe in a world that ended ten thousand years ago. A world of teeth. A world where hesitation meant blood.

    But the ghosts—oh, the ghosts stayed.

    In Wyoming, things don’t die right.

    They just hang around, changed into something else.

    —

    The herd kept throwing glances at the fence. A senseless hesitation. You see it when you’ve lived here too long: how animals keep faith with vanished pathways. How they push their soft muzzles against barbed wire as if the wire is the mistake, not the memory.

    The lead doe stepped back, pawed the earth, lunged again.

    Stopped.

    The kind of stop that isn’t surrender—just a recalibration of desperation.

    I’d done the same thing once.

    Pressed my life against the same thin barrier over and over, thinking persistence could undo architecture.

    That was the year I loved a man who carried a gun like it was part of his circulatory system. He’d been in a band—the ghosts of predators past—which felt poetic then, like we were living inside a metaphor we’d both agreed to believe. He talked about resurrection, survival, bloodlines older than the mines. But the night he put the barrel to my face, there was no poetry. Just breath, metal, and the awful recognition that he would always move faster toward violence than he ever moved toward love.

    He’s extinct now.

    Not dead—just gone the way predators go in the American West.

    Absorbed by distance, dust, the narrative pressure of a place that eats its own history.

    But my nervous system didn’t get the memo.

    It kept running.

    That’s the trouble with ghosts:

    evolution doesn’t shake them loose just because the body survives.

    —

    The pronghorn jerked, bolted a few feet, stopped again in that tight cluster of mistrust. Even the wind seemed to hesitate, unsure which direction to turn its face. The sky had that sickly bruise at the horizon—the color Wyoming gets before it decides whether to kill something or let it walk away.

    They say migration is instinct, but out here it looks more like compulsion. The strangest part is how these animals—the fastest in the hemisphere—get trapped by the slowest things: barbed wire stapled by a rancher who died decades ago, an interstate pouring east-west like a scar no pronghorn ever asked for, a subdivision named after the wildlife it displaced.

    Speed doesn’t save them.

    Speed betrays them.

    It lures them into running headlong into human geometry.

    I know the shape of that betrayal.

    It has the dimensions of a childhood home, of a house in Centennial with legal documents stacked like teeth, of every Wyoming hallway where silence pressed harder than fists.

    Outrun the thing too long and you lose the ability to understand what’s chasing you.

    —

    A semi roared by and the pronghorn flinched in collective panic. One young buck tried to run toward the road—pure instinct, pure velocity—before a doe cut him off with a sharp, decisive arc, saving him by accident or old knowledge. They wheeled again, bodies moving like punctuation in a sentence written before the concept of fences.

    The fence, though, stayed.

    Fences always do.

    This is the part of Wyoming no one writes about in travel magazines: the land is haunted by its own miscalculations. We built barriers the old predators never imagined, rewrote the chase, stripped out the teeth, left only the running.

    So now everything runs.

    Animals.

    Families.

    Women with dogs in the backseat of cars heading west at dawn, hoping the next town will be the one where the ghosts finally lose interest.

    But ghosts don’t get bored here.

    They settle.

    They nest.

    They become local.

    —

    The doe finally found a weakness in the wire—a sagging place where weather and neglect had worked together in slow conspiracy. She slipped through, ribs brushing the metal. One by one, the others followed, bodies folding and unfolding like secrets escaping through a too-small doorway. A few scraped hair from their backs, a minor blood price. Out here, every crossing requires flesh.

    I watched the last pronghorn hesitate, trembling.

    She looked directly at me—those black, ancient eyes—and for a second I felt something rare: not recognition, but mutual assessment. A kind of shared acknowledgment that neither of us were built for the world as it is.

    She went through.

    Left a tuft of hair on the barb.

    Didn’t look back.

    The herd reassembled on the far side and moved off into the sage, dissolving into the land the way Wyoming creatures do. First they’re there; then they’re legend.

    —

    People like to claim Wyoming is empty.

    It isn’t.

    It’s crowded with absences.

    With things that should have died but didn’t, and things that should have lived but couldn’t.

    Some days I feel like one of them:

    a pronghorn built for a chase that ended before I was born,

    a woman built for a family that couldn’t hold her,

    a survivor keyed to the breath of a man who is miles gone but somehow still pacing the dark edges of my brain.

    But I’m learning something the pronghorn never will:

    Ghosts don’t need to be outrun.

    They need to be watched until they flicker, until their outlines distort, until you realize the world has shifted again and the danger you were built for is not the danger you face.

    The old predators are gone.

    We’re the ones becoming ghosts now—

    moving fast, crossing wire, dissolving into the landscape,

    carrying the memories of teeth in bodies that still haven’t learned how to slow down.

    Whether that’s tragedy or evolution, I don’t know.

    But out here, on this wind-scoured road with the last light dying, it feels like truth.

    And in Wyoming, truth is the only thing that ever stays.