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It is darkening in the sky when Bronwen rumbles to a stop at a road side bar in the middle of the desert. The dust settles on the Norton’s retro-spoked wheels like the sunset over a new development as she pushes open the door, fighting the urge to one arm the door like a black hated cowboy in bad western.

Pulling her stool up to the bar, she brushes her hair away and looks the bartender straight in the eye.

“Did you know that bird shot is actually lead? It’s really bad for the environment.”

“What the fuck didja just say darlin’?” The bartender gapes.

“It leaches into the food of birds and the birds start having babies with missing eyes and legs, deformed wings, missing feet…”

“What the fuck?” he bubbles hoarsely.

 “Na mate, I’m just pullin’ your leg. ‘Tis me, Bronwen. I did those things. Now I’m tired, would ye mind fetching me a pint of your darkest?”

The bar tender stares at her crossly, “why didn’t ya just fucking ask. I don’t gotta know your sociopathic tendencies.”

The crowd in the bar starts casting sidelong glances, eyes molesting briefly, but assessing her motives.

“Where th’fuck wouldja find ducks out in the desert anyways?” someone whispers.

“Same thing happens to motorcycles,” she throws over her shoulder, eying up the guilty party. “I’m off small animals today, and on to expensive metal machinery.”

She thinks fondly over her pint.

It was a nice shotgun. Too bad it was loaded to the nines with the big boy rounds. She’d been tooling around in the parking lot behind F1X, smoking joint after joint and settling back on the long vinyl lawn chair filling the majority of space in the handicapped stall.

Why a place like F1X would have a handicap parking space was beyond her. She’d already thrown empty beer cans and bottles at Shawn’s taste of the month car earlier when he’d tried to usurp her stone-a-thon body clad in a black teeshirt, black jeans and combis, stretched out over his usual space. There was nothing like the feeling of the sun on a black teeshirt in mid-afternoon, when chilling out to metal and getting fucked. He moved into the stall reserved for pregnant women.

What the fuck?

She downs the pint quickly and points to the taps for another as she lights another smoke. A point slaps in front of her, soap bubbles still dripping down the side of the glass. She hefts the pint in one hand and throws it at the bartender’s feet. It smashes and waves of soapy brew mop the edges of his pants, glass floating gently down the length of bar over the slip.

“Get me another , ye fuckin’ wanker, and take care ye don’t fuck it up this time.”

The bar patrons stir a little, clump briefly and depart, going back to shooting pool and laughing raucously.

“Now jes one minute, who in the fuck do you think you are?” The bartender hollers.

“’Dat’s who I am,” she says, pointing at the flickering TV screen in the corner of the bar.

“The new wrestling company, F1X is having their first Universal Championship this week, featuring the infamous Shane Clemmens, Sean Walsh and the hardcore brawler, Bronwen O’Connor….”

Flashes of their images, of fights, flash across the screen. A scene where she lit the ring on fire with liquor from her mickey, and a flicked butt flits by, replaced by a shot of her beating down a fan who spat on her from the stands at the fight she lost a few weeks ago. Whatserdick, the one before the rapper. They’d had to scrape the kids teeth out from under the bleachers where they lay scattered amongst dropped gum and popcorn kernels. . The scar from the wee blokes crown now dimpled pinkly on one of her knuckles. The news flashes on, and a newscast about a murder rambles on faintly. This was going to be a different fight though. A triple threat against two legends, both whom she had earned respect and friendship from previously.

Bronwen mulls back to the back alley. She’d just swallowed alternating bites of mushroom caps and a nutritious energy bar and lay languidly in the sun, sipping on her flask of Daniels, bangs hanging over her eyes, tattoos gathering uneven warmth from the sun. She zoned out a little, and floated a little back to consciousness about ten to fifteen minutes later. 11:30 a.m. Not too early to get a fresh start on things. She reaches down beside her and pours herself a gin and tonic, lights up another joint, turns up her headphones.

She sleeps, bur her dreams are troubling. Dark shadows and mysterious bumps in the night, and windowpanes rattling from riot. They shift into the torturous imaginings of her mind, of him and that woman twisting and churning through the sheets of a hotel room, and fade into her throwing her flask at him as he walked away last time, bright silver soaring through the sky before it bounced off his head as he neared that horizon. Pushing him away, pretending vehemence, and proclaiming an ending ultimatum, had been a sorrowful affair. And yet, he hadn’t changed since then, still as flippant about it  about them, as brushing his teeth in the morning.  Still looked at her levelly, still touched her the same, still enraged her red sometimes. She could punch the smug bastard. As visions tumble and melt through her brain, the sun still warming her shoulders and cheeks, she snoozes on a bit more. She is in the middle of a galactic swirling of stars and paint when a familiar roar greets her ears, growing steadily closer.

“Huh,” she stirs, shielding her eyes from the sun and checking her watch. The Challenger, re-animated from crumpled burnt carcass, stutters into the parking lot. Lurches to a halt and rabbit jumps a few feet. She jumps to her feet, compensates a little, and stands up straight in the parking lot, crossing her arms as the car hops painfully closer, tires screeching. It comes to a smoking halt just shy of her legs, and the engine ticks and hisses impatiently in the silence of the stall. A lanky blond man is behind the wheel grinning sheepishly at her. He stumbles out of the car, looking at her somewhat manically for a moment before jamming his shades down.

“You look beautiful today baby,” he says, reaching over and tickling her earlobe with his finger before he runs into the building.

“Touch me again you little puke,” she yells, “and the Clemmens line will die out at you.”

Fuck she was stoned, wasn’t sure it was his little puke bro or not.

The glass is empty and she gestures again. The bartender carefully dries up the glass and pours her another, slapping it down on the bar, foam drizzling out over the glass.

She drains it and wipes her face, slapping the bar. The strippers have come on, faded cellulite, stretch marks and stained thongs, and the lights dim, sinking the bar into a cheap harsh blue lit cave.

“Another!” she growls, shortly after. The strippers have started swaying to the music in earnest, but the cd playlist screws up and Garth Brookes blares on at one point, causing their movements to stutter and pause for a minute as they switch into an underwear-tugging line dance of utter confusion.

She downs two more in this fashion, and the strippers start to lose their age and coke brow wrinkles, are reborn as smooth fuzzy sylphs of musical undulations.

While that brother of his was in the building, Bronwen lit a smoke and wandered over to the Challenger.  She flipped open the glove compartment, looking to see if he had any weed she could rip off him for the time being. Nothing but a small sticky note.

“Look in the tunk,” it said in blistering ball pen.

She closed the compartment and reached over into the car and hit the trunk latch. Swinging back to the trunk, she lifted it open to behold a long black case. Nestled inside was a long double chrome barreled shot gun, shells stacked in two small boxes. Birdshot and big boy rounds. She took them both and jammed them in her pockets. Grabbing the shot gun, she ran with glee back to the lawn chair and lay down on top of it. Just as she re-arranged her limbs to soak in the sun, he came running back out of the building.

“See you later Bronwen!” He gets into the Challenger and squeals away, the car shooting acrid smoke and leaping away in brief shuddering humps over the speed bumps.

“He wouldn’t have used it properly anyways,” she murmured, cringing at the sight of the car while patting the gun as she pulled it back out to admire it.

Bronwen stands up and slaps a few bills down on the counter, and lights up a smoke. “Where’s your pisser at?”

She elbows her way through the growing crowd of people in the bar and ends up at a door leading outside.  In the sunset, she can see the silhouette of a crescent moon cut out of a small shanty 100 yards away. Lizards scuttle away from her feet in the dying heat, and she stops to stand there for a while.  In the distance, the bald hills are red in the fading light, and there is nothing for miles but deserted back country.

She had been having a bad feeling in her gut all day. Something was up, but she didn’t know what. Something just wasn’t right. Not only had she been uncharacteristically restless, she’d carried a deep sense of foreboding around since she woke up. Alongside the usual feelings of needing escape from inside the house, she was much more restless than usual. Volatile.  She paces around outside for a few minutes, casting disgusted looks at the latrine and smoking a joint before going back in.

A dude is sitting in her stool, drinking the dregs of her pint. He’s tall and thick on all counts, a bear of a bastard with a dirty trucker hat on.

“Every asshole I meet seems to have a goddamn John Deere hat,” she mutters, grabbing a pool stick from a dude in mid-shot as she walks by, smoking the trucker on the back of the head with the butt. His face smashes forward into the bar, out cold.  She raises her boot calmly and pushes him off her stool onto the floor and sits back down.

“One more please,” she calls, “and a dram of whiskey for the road.”

The bartender turns to her and stops in mid-motion, staring at her. Staring past her. She turns and looks behind her. 9 men she hadn’t seen when she had first arrived were arranged in a semi-circle around her, guns drawn and pointed at her.

“Do you know who you just nailed with that stick girlie?” a man snaps at her, moving closer. He’s a big shiny faced smug looking bastard, in a ratty old baseball shirt, jeans and cowboy boots, under a long leather jacket.

“Was he your lover darlin’?” she sneered. The guns rise to the occasion of the insult, while she reaches for hers. Reaches again.  The Colt was gone, no longer tucked into the arms clasp of the bullet belt.

*fuck*

She had figured the shotgun was an early Valentines day present from Shane. Maybe even a bribe to get her to go easy on him in the ring. Maybe an assurance that she could still shoot at his heels if she lost to him. Maybe to seriously hurt Sean Walsh’s shitty ride. Shane was thoughtful like that sometimes. However, she’d ask him later and find that he had no idea it’d been there. All the same, it was a damn nice piece of machinery.

She’d slid it lovingly back into the strap bag it had been in while in the case after loading it with the big boy rounds. Bird shot was child’s play after all. Climbing onto the Norton much much later that day, she’d been refreshed from the sun and shroom session. Embracing fight mode.

The guy closest squeezes off a round a hair too late as Bronwen lurches forward and drops down, tackling him at the knees and taking him with her to the rough pine floor caked in grime.  She clobbers him with a dirty punch to his left eye socket, feels the squeak of a skull fracture under her fist and drives it in further. She keeps her fist there, pushing firmly, feeling the eyeball distort on the back of her forefinger as she grabs his gun away from his other hand, and presses it against his right temple.  She looks over her shoulder as she cocks the gun and scowls at the men crowded around her, various weaponry at the ready.

“So tell me then,” she says, shaking her hair out of her eyes, “is this guy as important to ye as that guy was?”

No one speaks for a deafeningly quiet moment. She pulls the trigger.

I really am looking forward to this fight quite a lot. It gives me immense pleasure to consider a match against two such formidable wrestlers. The rest of these little boys wishing they had big cocks have been awfully boring and trite examples of shit fights. Suffice to say, their mommies have come to pick them up and bought them all popsicles for their wounded pride by now.

 Sean Walsh and Shane Clemmens…the two sturdy dirty legends themselves. Very promising to be in a ring with two people who genuinely know their shit. I’d be proud to have my ass handed to me by either one of you, although I’m banking on that not being the case.  I’ve had both your backs for such a damn long time, learned your tricks, that it’s about time I put you on them while I still have my youth and vitality and you both fade with your wise age. How do the mighty really fall? I’m dying to find out.