Peacemaker

Like slumbering blurring lions, the baking blonde hills below had closed their eyes, and from atop a black steed he leaned to the right to give his aching back a break. Squeaking gloves carrying numb, hot fingers waved in warmheartedly into the mare’s mane and for a moment, squeezed and pulled; she sighed and neighed, telling him such gentle gestures meant the world to her. As he lifted his gaze to the haze of the faintly pink expanse, he counted three volitant vultures venturing south of no north.

 

 

”C’mon, Lilith,” he uttered almost in a whisper with a tender tug of the reigns. “We are not alone.”

 

Caressing the worn handle on his Colt with a bruised left thumb, beads of sweat scaled down his stubble, broken black boots twisted in their holsters, and with a hungry belly, he began the arduous trek down into Hell’s Valley with an undaunted twist of the mustache and a winking eye to the sky. Death was less than a day behind and he had found that was the secret of his success: to furtively feel whilst inhaling the perfumed breath of the void on one’s neck, claiming to rip you asunder, to uproot you and extinguish you into the blackest and quietest of nothings. And so, unkowningly, he became the agile agent of annihilation—Death’s Back Door Man. For in his pursuits to find a worthy contender, he had failed to realize the ultimate truth of his birth-given-scripted truth: He was Death.

 

 

And the horse’s shoes clipped then clopped…the sequence of beats in left-hind left-fore, a brief pause and right-hind, right-fore; each hoof creating its own cavernous sound in echoing angelic sequence…resounding through the canyons…spreading to the valley…gliding above water streams below.

∞