She stands at the top of an arroyo, gazing down into the rough cut crevice, thinking how much it resembles the craggy, lined granite cheek of her beloved Drygulch. Idly she contemplates the derivation of the word arroyo which means "dry gulch" and springs from the Latin Vulgate, arrugiu or 'underground passage'. He was
everywhere, haunting her with his memory. Absentmindedly pushing the damp tendrils of gold from her forehead, she lifts her sapphire eyes to the horizon stretching endlessly before her. Somewhere in all that wilderness, he wanders, Ol' Sal at his side, dusty and smelling of leather and sweat, an odor irresistible to her delicate nostrils.
She is thinner than she was a year ago, some of the softness gone from her frame. Her sharp cheekbones catch the sun through the tangle of hair, etching scrimshaw on her silken cheek. It had not been an easy winter. Torn between the emotional confusion of a haunting love affair with the ghost of a Romantic poet embodied in a Hispanic chicken fighter, the everpresent love for the never present Drygulch, and the womanly passion that remains unfulfilled in her body and being, she finds life to be far more complicated than it was when she was but a little naked spirit frolicking among the wolfcubs. Perhaps
she should settle down with Bub, raise a brood of Bubbas and Rambiettes, get a two-story cave, matching knives, his and her thongs. They were compatible--both equally skilled in knife-throwing, archery, riflery, and hand to hand. There would be long, enjoyable
evenings around the fire going one-on -one. But then, she remembered the way he had looked at Vagina Dentrita.
Oh, Drygulch, Drygulch.
Across the arroyo lay the land of DAR. But no barbacoa sent smoke signals of welcome. No sound of riotous laughter and drinking carried across the vast desert emptiness. Had she been gone too long? HAd too much reality been allowed to paint its putrid, dull colors across the canvas of her world? Had the souls of those who knew that real life happened in the imagination, in laughter, in the spirit, been caught by the depressing grayness of hard, cold facts? Could she still release them from the bondage of maturity and acceptable adult behavior? Was it too late?
She squared her slender shoulders, lifted her chin, and wondered how the heck she was going to get across this damn picturesque, but ridiculously impossible, Grand Canyon.
She hated it when her creator got carried away with descriptive phraseology.
Sighing she pulled a rope from her thong and tied it to an outcropping. There never seemed to be fatted calves in the future chapters of her life, only obstacles and perversity. |
