On the Third Day, Between Pages Two and Three
knock knock
who’s there
the Perpetrator
the Perpetrator who
the Perpetrator who steals your life at the end of this j…
[**sound of rapid cock and gunfire**]
— Don’t ever try to pull a fast one on the Cosmos Kid, kid! I’m the fastest draw on the Western front. Watch as I place my sidearm back in its holster.
The Cosmos Kid twirls the silver gun around his index finger by the trigger nock seven times, after which he catches the elk bone handle with the butt of his palm, abruptly halting the spin with the barrel pointed upwards, residual cordite wending slowly, its whorl tampered by audible breath to binge wayward. The Cosmos Kid grins a wry, one-sided smile that beams ‘pardner’, and tips back the brim of his white sands cowboy hat with the tip of the site’s spear. He unhands the weapon and let’s it freefall, with just enough angular coax to rotate 180° as he presents his hip to the descent while turning away towards the saloon, and his heat, demented and dreaming of gravity, drives itself into its carriage house.
— Now, let’s get us some stiff drink. The Cosmos Kid drapes an arm around Jimothy Crockitt as they head together for the winged swinging doors of the O’KK Korral.
Suddenly, the Cosmos Kid gets the intuitive [and spot-on!] sense that the narrative was about to deviate, blurring the rest of this encounter into a fade-out of forgotten activity. Forever in fear that during the moments of his departure, something terrible would happen: that a certain vengeful dusk-colored outlaw he once caged would return during a game of ace-high and run him through from behind with unicorn-patterned shiv while the camera’s panoptic eye was averted, or that he would suffer a debilitating brain clot, or worsening gastric pain that would lay him low for days… He instinctively urges himself to do something outrageous.
The Cosmos Kid punches Jimothy in his gut with a force that resides somewhere between jocularity and irritated aggravation. The tall, bulky boy registers no response, stone-faced and disengaged as if causality had never occurred to him.
— What’d you just say to me, kid?! The Cosmos Kid pushes Jimothy away from him by the shoulders, the lumbering teenager rag-dolling backward but staying on his feet, staring vacantly beyond the Kid, but clearly not lost in thought. A puddle of drool that had been welling in the crock of his lips bursts on impact and trickles down into a pocket of patchwork stubble. A tic, much like the Kid’s, winces the left side of Jimothy’s face, and a perceptive beam of sunlight would catch the subtle formation of a saline tear in the corner of his drifting eye.
[Elsewhere, deep in the] No, that was insufficient, so the dread of departure into obscurity overwhelms the Kid; he martially sweeps the legs out from under the Jimothy prop, and he falls rigid, as if cardboard, like a lone domino with nothing to strike but the ground in a plumed hustle of compacted desert sand.
— Fuck this.
He grabs his hat by the brim and rug-beats it against his cowhide chaps, turning it soot black in the dusty process. Both guns retrieved, he holds them upright as goalposts, striding towards the saloon entrance, blowing a tickle of mustache from his lips. Hinges screech and twang as he bursts into the saloon, silhouetted by the ferocity of high noon.
— Put your meat back in your shoes and your money on the table, earth-scurf, Black Bart’s in town!
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