The Fire and the Edge of the Light
The city was real.
On Friday nights the fire pit at El Cielito burned, because it always burned, because that was the social contract of the place. Whoever was in town drifted out to it after dark, and there was beer in a cooler and somebody's playlist on a speaker and the kind of conversation that only happens when people are too tired to be careful.
Travis came out late and sat in the tipped-back chair somebody - Eddie, it was always Eddie - had left by the pit. Eddie was already there, telling Rachel the story of the gray sky and the Cybertruck, and Rachel was telling him the riverbed was better than anything he shot at the ranch, and the two of them were laughing in the way of people who'd made something together and survived it. Alexis sat a little outside the circle, where she always sat, watching the fire and the people in equal measure. Clark wasn't there. Clark was rarely there. Cole came and went, refilling the cooler, keeping the night running the way he kept everything running.
Travis watched his team and felt the thing he tried not to let himself feel too often, because it embarrassed him: that he loved them. Not in any way he'd ever say. But these were his people, in his desert, around his fire, and the week had been good, and the work was real, and the city he'd built was standing.
He didn't think about the meeting in Dallas. He didn't think about the consultant who'd come and gone. He didn't think about Clark's mostly, sitting in him like a held breath three days later. He let himself have the fire and the people and the good week.
The thing about a dragon is that it doesn't announce itself. It doesn't attack the gate on the first night. It circles, far out, where the firelight doesn't reach, getting bigger in the dark while the people inside the walls do their jobs and laugh at their stories and feel, with every reason, safe.
The city was real. Travis had built it, and it was good, and it was standing.
And somewhere out past the edge of the light, getting larger, was the shape of everything that would ask him, before the season was over, to choose.
He didn't see it yet.
But Alexis, on the edge of the circle, watching the dark beyond the fire as much as the fire itself, almost did.
This entry is part of The Marfa Mavericks, a daily fiction podcast from The Marfa Strategy.
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