DamNear raises the crossbow to her shoulder, sights. Around her, wild grasses writhe with the fragrant sage, clinging to the rocky soil and swaying under the torturous pressure of the wind. Behind her, a thousand dead and dried bushes are submitting to the wind’s influence and flying away, tumbling and bouncing across the high desert. Above her, buzzards and ravens swing in wide arcs through the deep blue skies. This is a land of death and starvation: repressing heat and strangling cold, winds to lift you off your feet and rains to sink your car into the soil, lions and coyotes and bears, oh my.

DamNear is aiming at a PBR can she’s stuck onto a sage branch, a hundred paces away. The wind is high and warm from the southeast. DamNear cocks the bow, squints her little eye, and lets the bolt fly.

She misses, but it was damn near a hit.

That was the last of the five bolts she bought last time she was in Reno. Five for $19.95, what a fuckin ripoff. That, plus she has to get a ride out there and back every time she wants to buy some, and her paycheck doesn’t do gas money. Those bolts are barely worth it: the fuckers are made of fiberglass or something, and they break when they hit a rock hard enough. Bullshit.

DamNear sits down on a rock, hitching up her cut-off Carharts, crossing her scarred brown legs. She reaches for the tube of her Camelbak and takes a long sip of beer, then pulls the flask from her pocket. She holds it in both hands for a minute, thinking.

Four feet away or so, someone else is thinking too. He is thinking, okay okay just hold still, it’s not coming over here I’m safe just hold still and just in case, he is coiled and springloaded with his rattle held stiffly in the air, ready to sound the alarm. A drop of venom falls from his left fang and lands on a tiny black beetle, which dies instantly.

DamNear doesn’t see the rattlesnake, because she is tipsy and she is obsessing, and because it is hiding from her. She also doesn’t see the bobcat, the little brown bunnies, and most of the birds. This is normal. They are always hiding from us and from each other, stupid animals. What a lame existence.

But then again, so is living in a haunted motel in the middle of a desert, with winter coming. This is what DamNear is thinking. It’s not the first time she’s thought about it, but she spends more and more time on this particular topic lately. She scratches her cheek, scratches her head. The hardware in her hair (nuts and bolts, you know, but also an ancient bead and an obsidian arrowhead and a buzzard feather, all twisted into her little dredhawk and it’s a good thing she never sleeps) clinks against itself contentedly.

The rattlesnake, thinking she is making some sort of warning noise herself, decides to make a break for it. It slithers away at top speed, rustling through the dry grass as it goes. DamNear notices the sound but doesn’t turn her head. She doesn’t even, fucking, want to know. She unscrews the cap and draws deep from the flask, and then she stands up, brushes the burrs off her ass, rares back and kicks a rock as hard as she can. The rock doesn’t move. Now DamNear’s toe hurts, and she is almost out of beer, and there are five bolts somewhere on the ground that she has to find. She hopes none of them are cracked, those pieces of shit.



DamNear’s car is little and white and she bought it for $200 a couple years ago and it has “TURTLE XING” spraypainted on the front with a picture of a turtle. DamNear looooooooves turtles. She even has a turtle backpack that her friend Heather made out of felt for her. Turtle! She pets the little turtle on her car and giggles widely. Turtle. Her car is her turtle too, she loves it that much. She doesn’t have a driver’s license, but who gives a shit out here. The car isn’t registered or anything, it’s not really that roadworthy, there’s no back seat and you need a screwdriver to start it – but it’s the best car she’s ever driven. One time she was hauling ass across the desert and she hit a bump and all four wheels caught air and she just had time to think “oh SHIT” before it came CRASH!in back down and she swore to god she thought the whole underneath was going to come disconnected. But it didn’t, it was okay and now it just drives a little wobbly.

DamNear’s car is bouncing along a gravel road that leads from here to Winnemucca. She is not going to Winnemucca. First of all, Winnemucca sucks ass. Second of all, she is out of beer and she doesn’t have any money. No, she is going back to the motel, dammit, and she is going to smoke some speed and think about things like she does every night, and she will probably cut herself again.

…Sarah was not a turtle, she was a snake and she slithered away without saying goodbye and she took DamNear’s fucking CD book with her, which is so fucking not okay. Those CDs are all DamNear has to keep her busy, that bitch didn’t understand. Of course she didn’t, she could just get in her little gay boyfriend’s car and drive back to the city and work at a gas station or a restaurant or an accountant’s office or whatever the fuck she does, and go out dancing every night if she wants and buy ammunition at the fucking corner if she wants. And okay, she probably doesn’t buy ammunition because she doesn’t shoot, but she is in the city and she is dancing, and she has DamNear’s CDs and this situation leaves a major hole in DamNear’s head. Just as if that bitch had shot her.

“Why don’t you just aim for my heart next time,” DamNear murmurs.

…Sarah was not a turtle, she was a girl and when she danced she undulated her long limbs and swayed like a charmed snake, and her long neck held up a head of straight blond hair that floated like rainclouds whenever she turned quickly. DamNear used to love to brush that hair, and she used to love to watch Sarah sleep and stroke her clear, white, freckled forehead, and she loved to watch Sarah wake up and then she loved to kiss her everywhere all over. The sex was never very good though, which is how she always sort of knew that Sarah was straight. So maybe it hurt, maybe it hurt like a knife to the ribs when Sarah left, but DamNear had been ready for it. Sarah had only been here to visit anyway, here for a month, just here to party, and DamNear understood the concept.

What really hurt was how alone she felt when she realized Sarah had her tunes. She’d emailed her, you know, to let Sarah know. A week later, there was no response. No, fucking, response. That was low. DamNear had almost slit her wrists that night.






Once, long ago in this history of this town, a man shot his brother outside a house on Main Street. The brother fell into the street and his blood pooled in the dusty crescents of hoofprints and bootprints, and it soaked into the ground all night while he died, and as he died he thought of his wife and he thought of the girl he’d loved as a boy and he thought of his mother and he dreamed she came down from Heaven to carry him up into the sky. His blood sank into the ground and the beetles drank it, and it sank farther and clung to the wizened roots of crab grasses, and it sank and when it hit the sulphur rocks deep below, they began to steam with anger for the injustice of his killing, and the earth split open where his life had spilled into it, and to this day it steams and smells of death.

The man’s mother, after sacrificing her place in the afterlife to carry her son home, came to live in the house on Main Street, a specter: a ghost. She was a calm ghost, at peace with her decision. Her activities were fairly mundane: she had been seen attempting to dust the mantel in the parlor, or hovering in front of the hall mirror fixing her hair. She never set foot in the kitchen or the bedrooms: apparently, that part of her life no longer interested her.

Her son, the man who had killed his own brother, was very much alive and very troubled to see his mother in the hallway in the mornings. It also bothered his wife: in fact, it bothered her enough that she began to go mad and the local doctor was no help. There was no local preacher because there was no church in this town (and never would be, never in the town’s long life), and the man’s wife begged him to please take her away from the scent of hot sulphur and the ghost of his mother.

The man took his wife out in back of the house and shot her in the head to shut her up, and where he shot her there grew up an olive tree, and the ghost of his wife became caught in the branches. There, on windy nights, she sings a song of misery and loneliness, passion and loss.

The man was at the end of his rope, and he hitched up his horse to a wagon he’d stolen from a neighbor, and he turned it onto the road to drive it to Winnemucca. But two days’ ride out, the wagon betrayed him and he became stranded in the desert; his only choice was to ride the horse back to his house.

As he drew in sight of the town, the man’s horse collapsed beneath him and he had to shoot it in the ear, and it died peacefully and it left no ghost. But the man, the man staggered all the way back to town and died of thirst in his own back yard in the middle of the night, with his dead wife’s song ringing in his ears. And when the ground cracked open and his ghost was pulled downward into the netherworld, two lady ghosts pulled back, and held him there at the house where he was destined to throw fits of anger, over and over, for ever.

This place on Main Street, with the lurking hot spring splitting the grass and the sad wailing in the branches of the olive tree, is where DamNear lives. It’s a motel now, with one woman running the place, two permanent residents, and the rest of the rooms filled with junk. And the whole thing is haunted, scary haunted.

nonowrimo day one, unedited