The day Clara Hensley's life ended, she was still alive.
She sat on the porch of the Hensley homestead in the dying light of a spring evening, her knees drawn up under her chin, watching her mother hang the wash. The air smelled of dust and soap, the fields stretching wide and empty, the faint shimmer of gnats floating over the wheat. Clara thought about nothing much—her mother humming, the faint creak of the line, the sound of a crow winging its way overhead.
Life on the outskirts of Van Horn was hard, but Clara was used to hard. She was seventeen and already had hands like old leather, scarred up from chores, cut from hauling firewood, calloused from doing a man's work since her father's disappearance years ago. But she still had her mother, Martha, whose laugh could still brighten a room and whose hands, though just as weathered, had never lost their warmth.
That night, though, everything changed over something that wasn't worth spit.
A rider came up the lane—one of the local drunkards Clara recognized from town, a man named Stanley Pike. He stumbled off his horse, face red and sweat-streaked, staggering up toward the house with a pistol loose in his hand.
"Missus Hensley!" he barked, voice slurred. "You got my money? You borrowed two cents off me in the store yesterday, and I'll be damned if I let some widow cheat me!"
Clara froze on the porch steps.
Her mother straightened up, wiping damp hands on her skirt. "Mr. Pike, that was paid back already," Martha said calmly. "And even if it weren't, surely you wouldn't raise hell over two cents."
But Stanley was drunk, mean drunk, and the kind of man who liked showing his power when the world had given him none. He staggered closer, his eyes wild.
"You callin' me a liar, woman?" he hissed, lifting the pistol.
Clara shot to her feet. "Leave us alone, Pike!" she shouted.
Martha stepped between them. "Go on back to town, Stanley. Sleep it off."
The man sneered, lips curling back, and before Clara could even breathe, the gun cracked.
Her mother's body jerked once. Then Martha dropped in the dust, her white apron blooming red.
The world blurred for Clara—the crow screaming overhead, Pike's laughter echoing in her ears, her own heart hammering until it drowned out every other sound. She stumbled to her mother's side, pressing her hands uselessly against the wound.
"Ma?" she whispered. "Please, no, Ma…"
But Martha was gone.
Stanley Pike holstered his pistol, spat in the dirt, and mounted his horse like it hadn't been nothin' at all. He rode away laughing, as if two cents was worth a woman's life.
Clara stayed there in the dust long after her mother's blood soaked into the earth. When the stars came out, she wasn't the same girl anymore.
That night, she swore she would never be powerless again.