Saddled

by Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

“The gun is in my mouth,” I say.

“It’s in mine,” she says.

We are facing each other near the window.

If I could look behind myself, I would see a cheap oil painting of a canyon. Horses trot in the foreground. A cowboy is on one, tossing a lasso, but he seems like a late addition. The painting is really about the horses’ frustrations with how things turned out in the west. Still saddled.

“But I taste the metal,” I say.

“It’s just your imagination,” she says. “You’re holding it. The gun, I mean.”

I can see straight into her mouth when she’s talking: through the fine wrinkles and unshaved blond hairs on her upper lip to the crooked front teeth with nicotine stains to the thin and curling tongue to the dark hole that leads to her insides.

I guess that leads to everyone’s insides. Which means we are all walking around with a path to our insides on the surface of our outsides. But I try not to think too much about that.

This is how I know the gun is in my mouth. It’s not transparent. It would block the pathway to her insides. With the plan being that it would make a new one.

“I can’t feel my hand,” I say. “I think I fell asleep lying on it.”

“Well, it’s in your other hand, then,” she says. “It’s in the hand that’s holding it which is clearly not asleep because it’s got a finger on a trigger.”

“I might need to take a minute. Can I sit down?”

“Be my guest,” she says. “It’s your office.”

“It’s your hotel room,” I say.

She shrugs.

I sit on a red vinyl chair and take my head in my hands, though my right hand is still numb. My left hand dampens from the sweat in my hair. Audience members shout down a talk show guest on the television.

“Really impressive that you could keep the gun in my mouth while you sat down, bravo," she says.

“Are you being sarcastic?”

She doesn’t respond.

“But look,” I say, “the TV is on. It’s got to be your room, there’s no reason for me to have a TV on in the office.”

“I’m not your boss, I don’t care what you do at work,” she says. “All I care about is that you take this gun out of my mouth.”

I look down the bridge of my nose. Grey metal glints just underneath my upper lip, marking the passage to my insides.

She shivers.

I am cold, too.

The window looks onto an empty parking lot for a suburban east coast office building or a roadside southwestern motel.

Dust rises. A band of horses thunders across the concrete, eyes rolling, nostrils flaring, furiously trying to shake half-buckled saddles off their backs. Their wails are like tires screeching before an accident.

We both turn to watch. Steel knocks against teeth. Sparks judder down our dark throats.

Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece has strange fiction in places like Weird Horror, Exacting Clam, Waxen, and others. Her novel, Poltergeist, is out with Apocalypse Confidential.