The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

“I tried to talk to her, but no go. Can she talk?”

“Beats me.” I wished the man would leave; his cologne was offensive, all fussy woody notes and overlaid thickly with musk. He shaded his eyes, and blathered on, “I been asking around, and nobody knows who she is, where she comes from, nothing. Think she’s from the reservation?”

I repeated my theory about Indians being born wearing jewelry; when he asked if he could use it in his story, I told him to blow. The gods were smiling down on me; the guy actually left to go bother people in the crowd.

If the woman noticed the man pointing at her before, she either didn’t care or cared too much to let it show. Her plastic water jug was sweating, a dark ring circled it on the sand. She didn’t so much as swallow down spit.

I was swallowing for her as Duke called out the next break. She stayed in place, and when the break was over, she calmly put both hands on the white skin of the camper. The sun was shining full on the metal; against it, her hands looked brittle black.

I caught myself looking at her, even as I helped the waitresses who came in at midday to dish up the food. Duke’s till swelled. Duke bit his lips until blood came and dried red-black—the woman still hadn’t had a bite to eat, let alone a sip of water, or so he told me in a bile-scented whisper.

“Not that I got to worry, my boy, he’s doin’ fine. Pisses in a bucket so he don’t go over the breaks. Sunburned, but that’s not much, no?”

The woman didn’t sweat, that was the hard part for me. No water goes in, none can come out. I told myself that she’d have to keel over sometime, no body can live like that.

When the film crew approached her, tried to distract her, I bolted from the diner and told them to fuck off, knowing full well that they’d have to scrape their tape or erase the sound.

That was around four o’clock; there were only nine people left, including the woman. And one guy was swaying in place, his face cheesy pale under a dotting of black dead pores. Thinking, Let him fall, I looked away from the guy and took a good, close look at the woman. With a stillness which reminded me of a jackrabbit before it leaps away from a sudden intruder, she focused on the glaring surface of the camper, ignoring me.

She was so beautiful. Up close, under the harsh sun, I saw that she was past middle age. Thin lines creased her skm, dozens of them. Her nose was big at the tip, and her ears were just beginning to get that “big” look associated with old age. But she was so pure, so utterly, simply perfect. Her colors were so true, against the brightness of the land and sky around her. I could draw her face, describe her veined hands with their chipped, striated nails in detail, but O’Keeffe had painted her. Oh, not a portrait, Georgia didn’t stoop to such foolishness, bless her artist’s soul.