Who Won?

The grizzled cove came into town under his chimney hat. In those days, the purveyors of queer medicine rode ramshackle wagons swaying from side to side, ill-balanced between large leaning wheels, hauled by horses as small as mules. Horses that looked like giant rats from certain angles. Even his whip was as untidy as the wagon, its end frayed and with handle wrapped in stale open-pored leathery skin.

He had come to sell you something you ordered via the good offices of Wells Fargo and several telegraph poles ending in his (god)forsaken warebarn near the thistly thirsty canyon. You watched his wagon teeter into view between rocks that looked as if they had been placed there by a secondary scenery crew for a black and white Tex Ritter film.

As he got down from his creaky perch at the front of the wagon, he patted the scrawny beasts in horse-hide. And he waved a garish box in front of him for you to inspect. Up close, breath smelt more between you both than when separate, no doubt.

You do not know what he thought of you, as there was no description in his eyes. Nothing to pick out you and your hovel as backdrop. Nobody was alert enough to see you were almost dead in the sweating sun.

“You wanted this?”he asked with his contorted drawl.

You nodded as best you could. Difficult when you have scabs on the chin and something indescribable where the chin rested.

“Is it easy to win?” you managed to release from between impetigo-glued lips.

Yes, sit down and we shall try it out, you and the cove in the chimney hat with queer medicine to barter. To save one of us from the last gasp saloon.

He opened the box and a spark disrupted your misery for a nonce as you saw it contained hybrid items enough to fit out Snakes & Ladders as well as Ludo and, laughably, for this weather, Draughts. With bright colours and a shaker that rattled like diseased lumps inside a skull. Amid the endless whining of thistles and autonomous thirsts. Hissing snakes and snapping rungs.

*

“Who won?” you asked the new air between wads of fresh spittle.

But as ever, nobody was there to describe any outcome, sadly, except you. So why ask, you ask, this time silently.

All that you heard were the ghostly echoes of sporadic dice and crepitations of sand scraping across your dead skin.

Then, maybe, the trundle of a wagon sloping off for another game with another poor soul like you.

Then, even you left me. You, too. Left me moving onward within airless horse-hide toward the sickly rocking horizon. The Weirdmonger’s wagon hauled behind me.

..........
Adapted from my speed-writing exercise last night at the Clacton Writer’s Group.