Storm Girls (The Juniper Wars Book 4), Aaron Ritchey [best beach reads txt] 📗

I opened my eyes and looked out at the chaos of the world with the eyes of a dead woman.

Memorare

A candle in the window

A star there in the dark

Her smile wasn’t just a fire

Her smile was the spark

—Kris McCoy

(i)

REMEMBER ME, O MOST gracious Virgin Mary, remember me.

Don’t forget me, Holy Mary, Mother of God, even if you are just a story mamas tell their babies on cold December nights when the light seems gone and the cold is here to stay. Help me, ’cause even now I can feel that sharp bite of pain in me when I sit on my own thistle throne.

Forty years after that fateful day in the Marriott Conference Center’s Grand Ballroom, I have my own queendom in Colorado, a territory no more.

It’s December in Burlington, and I’m in the ranch house I rebuilt myself, without Hoyt’s money; the promised money never came.

We finished the house way before I started writing down my stories.

Forty years later, in the year 2098 if you can believe it, that’s when I first put pen to paper. Time is a snake without a tail, and on most days, I can’t hardly comprehend how long it’s been and how far I’ve come since that bad day in Kansas.

I can’t even begin to understand how I got to become older than my mama when she died. But I am. This past October I turned fifty-seven, and Mama died when she was fifty-three. Life is a funny thing, and aging is a dirty joke with a punch line that makes everyone feel awkward.

Family and friends told me I needed to write my story down. Before then, I had a ton of people wanting my story: historians, biographers, Hollywood directors, and talent agents so slimy they couldn’t hold a spoon to stir their coffee. Everyone wanted to know all there was to know ’cause I’d somehow become a celebrity.

It wasn’t ’cause of that moment in Hays, Kansas, when Micah Hoyt sucker punched me a second time on live video so the world could see.

And I didn’t get famous for the near-impossible cattle drive, or the dead run back across the Juniper, crawling down that long, lonesome highway.

No, fame hit me after. For what I did after Micah dropped me, took the chalkdrive and gave it to his daddy. Tibbs Hoyt prolly thought he’d surely never have to deal with me again, since I was only a Juniper girl, a piece of nothing that he didn’t have to look at twice and never in the eye ...

I became famous after all that.

When I threw down my Bible and strapped on my guns.

The fame served me, but then I had help using it. I got rich, but that isn’t so hard after you’ve died and walked across shards of broken glass to get back alive.

Funny, but we started out on our adventures to save the ranch and failed. But I eventually did rebuild our blue house on the yellow plains.

But I added a little office Mama would’ve been jealous of, right off the main living room, with books, a broad desk, and my paper and pens, ’cause I got in the habit of writing that way.

I’m looking out the window now, at the dark that comes so early in the day, and the shadows that have grown long. I can see Mama’s and Daddy’s grave markers, now granite and fancy ’cause now everything I have is new; nothing I own is salvaged, which isn’t as grand as I thought it would be.

Newness ain’t got a soul, but the old? The old stuff is richness itself, rich with memories and wanting and lost joys and remembered sorrows; the fortune is all in the smell, in the cracks, in the creases, in the use and in the upkeep. The richness comes with the maintenance. A lot of folks see that as a dirty word, but the world needs to be maintained.

Don’t know if God created the world, but I do believe She, and I might as well call it a She as not, well, Her job is to take care of us, to shine down when it’s darkest, and to guide us with the intuitive thought, the creative spark, the lone voice in the silence of our doubt and despair.

God won’t stop a bullet. No, I’d prayed for Her to spare people, and they’d been killed ’cause God’s job isn’t to save us when things get wicked.

No, God’s job is to maintain us as the world wears on us and cracks us apart. And She don’t do it with magic spells or fancy prayers or incense or Jesus cookies or nothing like that. She does it with other people.

We’re all God, and we’re only little pieces of God, and it’s our job to be the light we see in the darkness, even if we’re the only ones looking.

Some days that kind of God is enough. Other days? She’s just bad fiction. She’s a story that Rachel might understand, but I don’t.

My office is dark now, so dark I can hardly see to write on the page in front of me.

The light from the window is all but gone, and from my desk I can see the stars coming out in the sky.

I think about lighting a sapropel lantern for old time’s sake ’cause for months now, I’ve been living in the past, recounting my many adventures with my sisters, Pilate, Micaiah, all the rest of my friends, family, enemies, and supporting players.

I don’t light the lantern. Instead, I lean over and turn on a light, powered by the Eterna battery in the utility closet, and just like that, the gloom in the room is gone.

Quick as a snap and there’s light.

Snap quicker and there’s hope.

Light and hope returned to the Juniper, though now the Juniper is no more. America has fifty states once again, and I played a hand in doing that, but I couldn’t have done it alone.

No, I needed every single soul I could collect