Fucking John Wayne by Sara Hills

Dale knows it only takes four hours for a body to bloat in the desert. One day for flies. Three for maggots. Six for the skin to slip around the eyes.

Pebbles tick against the spokes of his bike tires as he nears the girl, arms spread like she died making dirt angels, midday sun bouncing off her body.

How long has she been lying here?

His guts squeeze all the way to his throat and he whiffs the air.

Please. Don’t let her be dead.

Just yesterday his dad said they’d found another body out near Whetstone. Most likely snakebite or heatstroke. The fucking desert sun. A healthy man might survive three days without water, if he’s lucky, but a girl?

If she’s dead, Dale doesn’t want to know. But he can’t just leave her.

“Hey,” he calls, shuffling his weight, poking her with the tip of his shoe.

Her side feels soft. Are dead people supposed to feel soft?

“Hey,” he yells again.

She opens her eyes and Dale jumps.

He wants to ask what she’s doing, who she is and why, but the words won’t come.

He should warn her. Tell her about the bodies, how his dad described them as more moist than leathered. Picked apart by animals. The fruited stench of rot.

Dale dreams them at night — all eye sockets and maggots — images he can’t shake, despite Dad calling him yellow, telling him he needs to be a fucking man and grow up.

Dale wishes he were brave like his dad, or even Han Solo or Clint Eastwood, wise enough to know what to say to a girl. He tries to think of movie lines, something inspirational, but the only thing that comes to him is the word pilgrim, over and over, until it spills out.

She stares at him like he’s an idiot. And he is, isn’t he? Pilgrim, like he’s fucking John Wayne and not some fraidy-cat boy on a bike. Shitting himself over some girl who isn’t even remotely dead. Thinking what, he’s gonna be a hero and save her?

“Go away!” she says, her voice the bark of a small dog.

Dale lifts his front tire off the ground and spins it, checking for thorns. He digs out two goatheads with his fingernails and drops them onto the exposed skin of her stomach, pink against her green t-shirt.

“I mean it,” she says, shaking off the goatheads. “Go away.”

“Rattlesnakes,” Dale starts, “the sun…”

“Yeah, I could die.” She pushes the dark hair from her freckled face. “So what.”

“Please,” Dale says, and the girl huffs.

She hoists herself off the ground, gives him the finger and stomps away.

Dale watches her leave, shrinking with each step, and his shoulders rise. He gets back on his bike—feet coasting the pedals, spokes ticking like clocks—and a theme song whistles in his head. Ah-ee-ah-ee-ahhhh, an imagined echo that rings from the distant indigo mountains and across the yawning expanse of the green-gold desert.

Sara Hills is the author of The Evolution of Birds, winner of the 2022 Saboteur Award for Best Short Story Collection. Her stories have been selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50 and The Best Small Fictions, as well as widely published in anthologies and magazines, including SmokeLong Quarterly, Cheap Pop, Fractured Lit, Cease Cows, Flash Frog, Splonk, and Reckon Review. Originally from the Sonoran Desert, Sara lives in Warwickshire, UK and tweets from @sarahillswrites.