The Girl Who Ran Wild

A moonlit Sierra ravine, half-gold, half-iron, spits out M’liss—barefoot, feral, hair like a thundercloud—after her father’s blood soaks the pines. Two vultures wearing human grins, Calaveras John and the oafish Johnny Cake, swagger in promising guardianship; their pockets jingle with the dead man’s boots. For a spell the child snarls, steals, outcusses the owls, until a chalk-dusted easterner, the schoolmaster, plants a book where her heart should be. Soap, calico, and subjunctive verbs tame the musk of her skin, yet gossip of his betrothal to some porcelain paragon ignites the old wildfire: she bolts, betrothed herself to a river-gambler with a silver grin. Cue fists, moonshine, and a midnight classroom duel lit only by shame and starlight—one man fighting to keep her from becoming the ghost the frontier expects, the other fighting to own that ghost. When the dust settles, the victor is neither; it is the girl who chooses the unmapped horizon, her newly inked name drying on a slate that once read "property."