Debt, 1889

Ol' Buster's Wild West Show stopped overnight in Dover, where the Lakotas and the Man Who Could Catch Bullets Between His Teeth wandered down to the base of the chalky cliffs. Pete Jones was the real name of the Man Who Could Catch Bullets Between His Teeth, and he had a hungry wife and five daughters back in South Dakota. Pete pulled off his worn boot and tattered sock and dipped his bare foot in the icy water. He told the Indians, “I never felt no ocean before.”

As they washed off their painted-on wounds, the Indians told Pete they were continuing along the beach and they would no longer be displayed like circus animals.

Pete nodded and said, “I just gotta catch three more bullets in London, and then I'm free.”

*

After the telegram about the bullet through Daddy's throat, and the wailing around a small tombstone that couldn't even be put in the cemetery straight, and all that drunken shooting into the starry night sky, and Mama bedding down with a cavalry man who had a Mexican scalp collection, Delilah Jones decided to leave for San Francisco. She had the very clear aim of becoming a stenographer.

The 18-year-old held her valise on her lap while the train rattled past the pockmarked fence the teenagers used for target practice. Inside the valise, carefully wrapped in Delilah's initialed handkerchief, was a bottle of white sand from England.

David Massengill is a Bay Area native who now lives in Seattle. His short stories and works of flash fiction have appeared in Eclectica Magazine, Word Riot, Glossolalia, 3 A.M. Magazine, Pulp Metal Magazine, and Tainted Tea, among other literary journals. He's currently exploring that valley between literary fiction and genre fiction. His Web site is www.davidmassengillfiction.com.