Dispatches from the Splinters of My Mind – Entry IV

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I’ve spent twenty-five years wandering the constellations of dust that pass for towns in these parts, chasing rumors of justice across salt flats and sun-stained mesas, my hand welded to the only gospel this world respects—cold iron, burnished to a black shine by blood and the desert’s endless hunger. Every dawn, I’d cinch a deadman’s resolve around my ribs and tell myself I was the steady hand in a world built on bad intentions, that each finger’s pressure on a trigger could tip the scales back toward something like decency. But time—time is a lizard’s tongue: flicking, unseen, snatching up the moments until you’re left staring at a husk, trying to remember how you ever filled it. Sooner or later, you see it for what it is: a young man’s dare delivered to the gods, a clumsy ballet of violence dressed up as virtue, death’s grand masquerade with your own face under the mask.

The desert kept its own ledger, written in wind and stone. Rivers shrank to scars, and every town I passed through felt like a graveyard waiting for names. Vultures taught me patience better than any preacher, circling in their slow sermons, never rushing what they knew was inevitable. Out here, the land didn’t just watch—it judged. Every canyon whispered back the sound of your gun, long after the body cooled.

Every soul I ushered into the hush had a name—sometimes carved on a tin badge, more often graven into the blue-black veins of the territory’s memory, where the ghosts stacked up like poker chips. I tried to keep them at a distance, let the desert swallow their last words before they could echo. But there is no distance in these plains, only the illusion of it. You run a man down at noon, the dust still wet with his shadow, and by sundown your own shadow’s right there beside his, stitched together over the dirt. I told myself numbness was a tool, a way to keep the tremor out of my hand, but numbness is a kind of debt, and the interest compounds in silence. I was too busy forging my legend—chiseled in the splinters of busted up saloons and the blue smoke curling from spent casings—to notice what I’d mortgaged away.

So now I’m the last dog in the fight, nothing left but a brittle skeleton propped against a fence post, watching the horizon try to out-bleed itself every evening, waiting for the sun to name one color I haven’t seen a man die in. I count the ghosts that trail me like some biblical plague, each one a mile marker on the road I can’t stop walking.

Just crawled out of a dime stretch—ten years locked inside iron and spit, with only the slow creep of rust and regret for company—but that’s pocket change compared to the ledger I keep in my head, a ledger no warden’s key will ever unlock. The past doesn’t loosen its grip; if anything, it tightens until you can’t tell your own pulse from the memory of someone else’s. Out here, they call me a legend, a walking parable, the old coyote that’s outlived every snare and bullet. But legends are just stories that haven’t had their endings written yet. The endings always come, and they are never kind.

Once, a boy no older than my own reflection at nineteen tried to catch me in the middle of a mud street. His hat was too big, his holster too stiff. I watched his lip tremble before his hand even twitched. And in that stutter of fear, I saw myself—hungry, stupid, convinced the world owed me immortality. I let him draw first, because mercy was a luxury neither of us could afford. When he fell, I felt no triumph, only recognition. The desert doesn’t make room for fathers, only mirrors.

There is a whole generation of greenhorns—some with badges, some with nothing but their mother’s borrowed last name—who’d sleep sweeter with my scalp nailed to their saddle horn. Each one wants to be the one to rewrite the myth: to show the world the old king had no teeth left, that even legends can bleed. What they don’t see is that the fire never really dies, it just settles into the bones. They walk up fast, hot with the promise of their own immortality, and they think the shaking in my hands is age, not anticipation.

Justice—my old, two-faced companion—watches from the back of every whiskey glass and midnight mirror. When I was young, he sat shotgun, fed me lies about glory and honor and the clean line between good men and bad. But that line was always drawn in sand, and every storm I weathered blurred it until no one remembered which side they started on. Now he hides behind the badge, jeering at me from the safety of his armchair, pretending he wasn’t the one who put the first pistol in my grip. Hypocrite. He wants to see me pay for my excesses, but he forgets: I always paid in advance.

When the night rolls over the land and the wind starts to howl like an orphaned child, the voices come crawling in from the edges. “Was it worth it?” they ask, breathless, persistent, soft as the moths in the old preacher’s study. Worth the empty chairs at dinner tables, the widows with nothing left but a wedding ring and a story? Worth the holes I punched in the world, the ones I never bothered to fill back in? I’ve no answer for them, and by now I doubt I’ll ever find one. Only this: the world is made of debts, and violence always knows where to send the bill.

These days, even my dreams betray me. No sweet lies, no gentle horizons—only the endless replay of gunfire, a carousel of faces turning toward me in their last astonishment. Sometimes I wonder if I’d even know what rest felt like, if peace ever did arrive. Maybe I’d flinch from it, the way a stray dog flinches from kindness.

Tonight, I can feel it: the ledger’s come due. The sky above is swept clean and hard as flint, the air stinking of cordite and things long dead. I lie here, spine pressed to the living earth, the stars blinking overhead like a jury summoned to pass sentence. My hand’s locked around the iron, the heat of the last shot still ghosting up through the barrel. Around me, the sand is pitted and blackened, marking the places where hope gave up and history picked up the slack.

This is what justice looks like, in the end: a man alone, weapon cooling, waiting for the world to decide if his next breath will matter. For a heartbeat, everything holds still. The air itself is an intake of judgment.

Will they let me die with my boots on? Will the dead finally cut me some slack and let me drift into whatever comes next? Or will the world keep chasing me, day after day, circle after circle, like a dog gnawing a bone it’ll never finish?

I laugh—a dry, cracking thing that feels like it might shatter my teeth. It’s the laugh of a child who’s seen the trick behind the magic, the snort that follows every preacher’s sermon. Life and death, justice and sin: all of it a rigged game, played out over and over until the deck wears thin.

I should be afraid. I should pray. But all I feel is the deep drag of exhaustion and, maybe, the faint warmth of something like relief.

But peace—peace’s for fools, for greenhorns and saints, not the likes of me. Not a man who emptied his promise to the desert and let it keep the change.

I close my eyes and try to shoulder the weight of every life I ever took, every mile I rode with justice whispering fever-dreams in my ear. Maybe there’s a way out. Maybe there isn’t.

Either way, I’ll keep my iron close and my eyes open. In this world, justice is just another word for a story that won’t end, and legends—they never really die.

They just get older, and a little sadder, and wait for the next bullet to teach them something new.

They just keep glancing over their shoulders, waiting for the next bullet.

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Author’s Note

Another ride through the dust for Dispatches from the Splinters of My Mind. This one lives in the twilight—half confession, half reckoning—an old gunslinger’s ledger of debts that can never be balanced. The West here isn’t about glory or the last man standing; it’s about the silence that follows every shot, the weight of a myth too heavy to carry. Maybe you’ll hear echoes of your own shadows in his words, or maybe you’ll just taste the grit of the desert wind on your teeth. Either way, this dispatch isn’t about answers—it’s about what’s left when the smoke clears.