Leave (END)

Even with her senses utterly drowned out by booze, Texas had more than enough left over to know better than to stay around Annabelle and her cronies. She had to leave, and she had to do so now.

“Where do ya think you’re going?”

If Texas had been sitting on a powder keg from the minute that she stepped into the saloon, now was the moment that the match was struck.

A falling chair. A sudden holler of surprise. Fists flew, though Texas couldn’t say whose or where they were flying to. A calamitous cacophony erupted from somewhere. Nowhere. Everywhere. Maybe.

Somewhere, a chair likely smashed over someone’s head. Might have been Texas’ or might have been someone else’s. Had Texas just started a barfight? Was now a good time to leave?

She guessed she’d give it a go.

A few hours later, Texas awoke and found herself sincerely wishing that she hadn’t. Her throat was about as dry as a midday stroll in the desert, her tongue feeling like a lump of sandpaper lodged uncomfortably in her mouth like a gag. She throbbed with pain which seemed to exist both inside and outside of her head.

That barfight hadn’t been imagined then. A ginger tap at her head proved that Texas hadn’t sustained any major injuries, but would almost certainly have a hell of a black eye to show for her adventures. Not that the pain around her right eye held a candle to what was going on inside her head, which felt like her brain had been dumped in a box with a thousand pieces of shattered glass.

It was a miracle that Texas had managed to find herself somewhere comfortable to sleep.

Which was around about the time that Texas realised where she was.

The surface that she’d found herself on was soft. A little too soft and more than a little wet besides. She set her hand against the floor and heard an audible squelch. Muck bubbled up around her fingers and Texas became dimly aware of the snuffling just off to her side.

Daring to open her eyes to the piercing screech of light filtering in through the gaps in her wooden surroundings, Texas finally took in that, in her drunken ambling, she had somehow staggered into a nearby pig pen. Her entire left side was spattered in muck, all the way from braid to boot. Somewhere along the way, Texas had even lost her treasured hat. Nor had her six-shooter seemed to have fared much better, since that didn’t appear to be anywhere in reach.

And Texas wasn’t alone. As her eyes adjusted to the brightness of her surroundings, she found her gaze held by another creature, standing above her prone body. A pig hovered over Texas, staring down with something that might well have been sympathy in its eyes. Though more than likely that was just Texas projecting all the self-pity that she felt for her poor, hungover self.

“You don’t suppose nobody noticed their sheriff got herself all liquored up on a weekday afternoon, do ya?” Texas asked the pig, not exactly expecting an answer.

It snuffled at her and grunted.

It then turned around and exposed its gargantuan, flabby backside and, with seemingly no respect for the local law enforcement, erupted with a hideous fart that smacked Texas directly as powerful as a punch.

The gaseous gale was enough to blow back Texas’ braid and she cried out in disgust. The smell was bad enough that she could taste it, lingering on her tongue like a fever. It stank ten times worse than all the mass in this hovel, the stench telling a tale of the rotten slop dumped into the troughs daily for its feed.

“Oh, you disgustin lil scrap of bacon!” Texas cried. She pushed herself onto one elbow and waved a hand in front of her face while the pig looked back and her and snickered nastily. It seemed proud enough of its rotten feat to baste Texas with another blast of porcine putridness, this one longer and wetter, yet roasting warm enough to dry the mud caking the side of Texas’ face.

Hungover as she was, Texas barely had the strength in her to make a speedy getaway. She tried to lurch to her feet but clumsily fell back down. The pig noticed Texas’ weakness and its evil grin grew all the crueller. It began to pace itself backwards, swinging its ample rump with a gleeful, prideful abandon. A shadow fell over the sheriff, round and ominous.

This was not about to happen! Texas couldn’t let it. She was the lawmaker of this town, the guardian, the sheriff. She would not be defeated before she’d even done anything with her day. Not to something as lowly as a pig!

“Please, don’t!”

The pig slammed its ass down on Texas’ face, clearly lacking in any of the pity that the weasel had hoped she’d seen earlier. No sooner had it hit the ground than it let rip with another putrid poot, which bubbled the mud around it and brought out a scream of despair from the pinned weasel beneath it. Her legs kicked out impotently, digging deep troughs in the brown muck that would offer Texas no salvation.

Toot after toot, the pig never seemed to let up, nor did it have any interest in doing so. It had a new toy, a new little fart cushion to play with and how lucky it had been that she happened to fall into its pen. It rose onto its flank and began to grind and smush the intruder into a fine paste, flattening out her contours and leaving her a weasel-shaped pancake beneath it.

By the time anyone came in to check on the pig, they’d have no way of knowing it had made a new friend. Texas was easily hidden beneath a fine layer of muck, helpless to escape her new life as a porcine fart cushion.

In the town of Gold Springs, nobody would be able to say what happened to their former sheriff. All they could figure was that she had given up, gone down to the saloon one day, lost herself in liquor, and disappeared into the desert to let her old deputy, Georgia, take her place. Nobody would know the truth, save for one gassy pig.

A series of very bad decisions had led to this moment, and not even Texas could argue that she hadn’t deserved this.