The Scenic Route

The Brute had kept that, at least, although he'd kept her secret more for himself than he had for her, she knew.

Her secret had become their secret, and their secret was necessarily also his secret. If he were to tell on her, he'd be telling on himself as well, and he couldn't bear that, any more than he'd been able, finally, to accept her for who and what she was, for her true self, although, at first, he'd supposed he could, and she had believed that he might. In the end, though, he hadn't been man enough.

But Bruce was of the past. She'd left him back in the Oklahoma-Is-OK state of her existence, and she'd moved on. To better things, she hoped.

She smelled the perfume of the flowers and smiled at their glorious beauty. She watched a butterfly flit among the blossoms, and she thought, like it, she, too, had found true beauty, both in the desert wildflowers and within her own soul. Kevin's smiling face--the sparkling blue eyes gone crescent, the smile an upside-down bow, the dimples deep in his cheeks, a day's dandelion fuzz on his cheeks and chin--appeared to her, out of the desert landscape, as if it were a flower itself, tossing in the breeze. He, too, might be a beautiful blossom to be planted in the garden of her life, she thought.

She spent the rest of the afternoon frolicking in the canyon, among the flowers, pausing, occasionally, to dance and prance, her breasts bouncing and her buttocks flexing, as a lightness of being filled her heart and mind as if it were helium; sometimes, she imagined that she drifted, like a cloud, across the countryside, or flew, flitting from flower to flower, like a butterfly. Such were the thoughts that nymphs entertained, she told herself, when they strolled through the gardens of the earth, and such were the thoughts that she herself had come to entertain.


That night, she stayed at a motel outside Ely, where she watched the video she'd recorded of her journey through the state's mountains, valleys, forests, and towns. She watched herself undress and walk through the canyon that wound to the northeast of Dixie Valley. She was beautiful, a naked nymph among the wildflowers and blooming cacti, her buttocks, her breasts, her groin as lovely as any blossom in the land; she fell asleep as the camera began to pan down, past the fluff of her pubes and her creamy thighs.