THE LAST GUNSLINGER: "Lydia Laren"

Failed Story Idea from like 2009... the idea was to tell the story of this guy who believed he was the last gunslinger during the 1920s and 1930s... The story is told from other peoples perspectives.

The smell of stale cigarettes filled the void of Lydia’s vacant heart. Her sense of apathy towards everything was her seemingly eternal curse. It would be too cliché to say she was without love interests or people to care for, she simply had been beaten down by life until she had reached a point of utter nihilism. To some, joining a political group would have been an option, in fact many of the girls she worked with at the Phelps Shoe Shine factory were a member of the union and quite active in quite a number of activities. They'd picket for more rights, one girl even was caught in an anarchists plot to blow up the factory.

If the truth be told, she'd been quite lucky to have found work at Phelps, most of the other girls on the line were younger than her 21 years, some as young as 12. The work was scarce; many of the girls were working just to (literally) put bread on the table for their families. Lydia wasn’t that different herself, at 21 she found herself as the single mother of two after her husband died in the last months of the Great War, he’d only been deployed 5 months, and never had even seen his second daughter’s birth. The pay wasn’t much, but it was enough to cover her expenses after she was forced to move back in with her parents. The humiliation of having left at 17 so proud and so sure of herself, only to return 4 years later with 2 children in tow, add in the change of lifestyle, from proud soldier’s wife to working class wage slave, from status and respect, to pity and charity… and it becomes easy to see how much Lydia deserved to hate her fate, to hate her life. Finding a man was no problem for her, but finding a man who was willing to accept another man’s children, that was a much harsher task. But in the months since her return to home, she had yet to find anything to bring a smile to her face. Not once had a laugh or a giggle escape her lips. Life was hard, all the way around. It never got any easier; it didn’t seem like there was any hope.

To think that on a day seemingly like any other in her mundane existence would be any different. She didn’t think anything of it when “the kid” and his horse showed up outside the gates of the factory. None of the girls knew who he was, but his unshaven face and his youth gave him his little nickname amongst the factory gals. It had been a week since he’d first showed up, eyeing the girls up and down. Little Irene thought for sure he was giving her the eye. She was only 14, she thought he was maybe 17, Nancy, who was responsible for labelling the canisters of shoe polish, thought he may’ve been 22, but no one took her seriously. The general consensus was that he was 17 or 18, so Lydia never had paid him any mind. But he had paid her plenty of mind, being a bit older than the rest of the girls, not to mention melancholy in comparison to the idealistic teenage girls with hopeful eyes. She’d intrigued him at first, and the more she wasn’t intrigued by him, the more he wanted her. But on this mundane Monday, her life changed. She was but two blocks from the factory when amongst the sounds of the industrial age, she heard a sound almost out of place, the sound of horse hoofs upon cobblestone streets. Lydia began to turn to see the source of the commotion, when suddenly a hand reached down, and with a surprising show of strength, hoisted her up upon his steed, her left leg flung over the horse so that she was face-to-face with her abductor. Before she could protest her kidnapping, his lips pressed hard into hers, his tongue thrusting into her breathless mouth, her defences melted like butter. This was no ‘kid’. Not even her husband had kissed her like this. Suddenly, her wits came about her and she realized the horse had come to a stop and was munching on some grass, it was her chance for escape, but before the thought had even really been processed, his arms wrapped around her and gripped hard on the reins. The wind raced through her hair from behind, his arms felt so secure around her, her mind even momentarily forgot her plight. But only momentarily.