PodCastle

* Author : Stephanie Charette
* Narrator : Robin McLeavy
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Peter Wood
* Artist : Geneva Benton
*
Discuss on Forums



PodCastle 514, ARTEMIS RISING: My Heart the Bullet in the Chamber is a PodCastle original.


Rated R, for shootin’, cussin’, and rollin’ in the hay.
My Heart the Bullet in the Chamber
by Stephanie Charette
They said I wouldn’t feel anything from the waist down but that was a lie from the first contraction. Yet when the good doctor took away the baby — healthy, crying — and offered that blood-christened Spencer Repeater in her place, I cradled its stock and barrel and felt the fires of justice in my hands.
I will never know my daughter. She will be but one more child in the communal creche, just as I was, to be raised by women who choose not to take a gun.
I earned my gun.
For the rosewood in her barrel, and for my sister Rosamund, I named her Rosie.
Rosie would get me my revenge.
The doctor told me later I fell asleep with Rosie in my hands and would not let it go until the next morning. Had to pry it from blood-cracked hands.
Just so.

Two weeks later and I’m out from under Doc’s care. It’s the full-on miserable hot summer I’ve grown accustomed to hating, where the air is thick with flies and horse shit and everyone’s cross. I’m sore, too, chewing the doctor’s tablets while I lurk in the shadow of the saloon awning as a commotion starts up down the road. My tits are back to normal — Doc gave me a tincture to dry them right up — but my hips ache and sitting ain’t comfortable anymore. They tell me that’ll pass, so I just keep moving and hope my bones and insides knit together true.
I fidget with Rosie’s leather sling, made myself in my seventh month, her name and mine stitched with tiny beads of garnet and hematite. Carry Rosie everywhere. When it’s not wrapped around me, I’m naked.
Everyone’s like that with her gun. Guns of any kind: ones we’ve made, ones we’ve bartered for, ones we brought with us, ones we’ve stolen. A woman’s gun is her right, her privilege and her duty.
A duty all of us must be ready to carry out.
I watch him, a man, struggle to get up out of a muddy rut in the road. Three women not far behind him walk easy. They ain’t in a rush ‘cause they know, like everyone knows, there’s no place for him to go.
Man’s blubbering. He gets up onto both feet but a sharp shot from a sling strikes an inch from his heel and sends him careening forward. I see Connie, dark mane loose in blistering wind, ready another stone. Sasp is not far behind, no weapon in her hand, but fury ripples like a shield before her. She’s howling without words at the man running ahead.
Between the idiot and the two women is Abigail slotting in one bullet then another into her rifle, calm and unstoppable as sunrise.
I’m not the only one watching. Some take up positions by a fence, a post. Others hang out of windows, making bets, calling others to witness. Mostly women but a few men, too. Even the creche center, least the older kids, are being made to watch and learn.
The man, begging, thinks there’s another way out.
I look at Sasp again. Her shirt is torn, one breast exposed. Blood on her hands. I grip the railing under the awning till my fingers are white and hard as quartz. They’re hungry for Rosie but I keep them where they are. He’s not mine to take.
“I’ll leave!