The Hobo of Pizen City

A dust-caked stranger, draped in the ragged regalia of a tramp, shambles through Pizen City’s sun-scorched thoroughfare; his cracked boots drum against the boards like a half-remembered hymn. One glimpse of the new schoolmarm—her calico dress a trembling cerulean flag against the ochre waste—detonates a metamorphosis: the hobo sloughs his tatters, wriggles into a dove-grey frock coat, and re-emerges a suitor armed with a poet’s tongue and a cardsharp’s grin. Yet the town, a festering blister of saloon smoke and whispers, demands payment for every flourish; gamblers, cattle barons, and the preacher’s spinster sister each tug at the newly polished sleeve, testing whether love’s fresh varnish can outshine the lead beneath. In the clock-tower dusk, the erstwhile vagrant must decide if the woman who conjured his better self is worth the blood it will cost to keep that self alive.