Our Lady of Shadows

In Hell's Fountain the heat of the afternoon lingers as long as possible, yielding grudgingly to a less hot evening. Less hot means the shadows become livable so that folk begin to stir as the sun drops toward the horizon. The young lady moving up the now shadowed street has an air of secretiveness, her eyes darting in all directions, shoulder length hair swaying with the back and forth swing of the head, lips moving as if in conversation. In the early evening gloom, her shadow seems to follow her from a distance as if frightened by the form it mimics. From darkened pool to darkened pool, the woman eases along the street, alone with her thoughts.

The walls around her are the stolid adobe construction indigenous to the town, very thick, and so low that a tall man's head peers across rooftops. The woman is not that tall, the crown of her head moving evenly with the crown of the walls. On the other side of the walls are homes, sunk into the desert so that what seems low wall on the outside inside provides lift of 10 or so feet from the floor. The occasional door breaks the stolidity of the walls she passes.

She whispers as she goes, whispers in the give and take of debate, her adversaries in her head, voices that chide and sneer, advise and rarely consent. She tells no one of these voices fearing what the god fearing people of this town might think, petrified that she, daughter of the desert, might have to explain to their almighty majesties, the Magistrates, who and how she is. So, she whispers and watches that no one see her whisper and navigates the deserted street.

"Yes, I am out," she mumbles, "yes, I could be seen but it is evening and darkening and I can move in shadow...you know why I must be out, the jakes are the only safe place for me......yes, my shit can give me away.....yes, I can piss my life away......yes, yes, oh, yes...but I can't hold it forever, that will kill me, too...well, if you're my personal gods, then relieve my bladder, make the shit disappear.....oh, you're not that personal, eh............"

Conversation she has had before and will have again. Every day of her life or every day that she can remember - which is the same thing, the voices wake her in the morning and put her to sleep at night. Bickering, complaining, insulting, warning as they do now.

She continues moving through shadow, crossing intersections carefully, and heading towards the city's primary drain where public jakes are in place but little used at this time of evening. Not furtive, just careful. So careful the figure now running the wall top behind her and gaining rapidly does not see her nor does he see her hand snake out to snare his loose trouser and yank, hard.

His running stops but his momentum has not time to realize the change in plans and hurtles the man off the wall top into a huddled mess on the street, a tangled, pained mess held in place against the wall he just vacated by the thinnest of daggers placed just so delicately at the bottom of the man's throat, the point digging into that little hollow between breast bone and throat proper. His gaze, as focus returns, slides up the blade to find a very strong hand attached to a decent arm buried in a cheap cotton dress, only slightly less dark than the shadows that surround them.