Lady in Red

By -
     There is a place that is split in two. 
    On one side of the divide sits a town half-buried in dust, barren open plains, and dry, wind-stripped canyons. The sun beats down with a hateful, constant heat there. There the beams that make the people's buildings are bleached and splintered under the sun's intense heat, and the people who live there are sun-creased and wily as coyotes, their senses of humor and of honor as stripped to the bone as their towns. They only know the heat and the dusty dry; they thirst there, thirst for cool, for fertile ground, for water in abundance.
    The towns on the other side have never known that hateful heat. All they know is rain. Rain that pours in never-ceasing sheets from the black sky and drips down their flickering neon bulbs and wet-blurred windows. They walk through dark streets under an inch of water with their heads down, the rain sliding off the hoods of their ponchos and their sleek coats, down to drip off and join the ever-present pattering all around. They crave heat, warmth, the comfortable life-giving blanket of the greatest light in the sky. None of them know what the sun is, except as a faint glow beyond the curtain. 
    The curtain. The ones in the sun blame the ones in the rain for that. The curtain is made of raindrops, raindrops falling so fast and so hard they strike the earth with the strength of bullets. They've carved a narrow ravine with their strength, and they have never stopped striking its bottom for even a moment as far back as memory can go. No man can cross the curtain, neither for rain nor for shine, and many have tried. 
    No man can cross it. But there is a woman who does. A woman in red. 
    The people on both sides know her, the lady in red leather with the long dark hair holding a thin, smoking pipe, her wide-brimmed hat halting both rays and raindrops.
    She's a vigilante, most people acknowledge that, a dealer of justice, a tall lady wraith with a smoking gun to match her smoking pipe. She never speaks. She only stands and sips her smoke, eyes glinting from the shadow under her hat. The gun on her hip has an ivory handle, and thin, elegant wisps drift up from the barrel after its use.
    She has no horse, no means of transportation other than her own two legs, but no one who chases her is ever able to keep up with her. She disappears from one town like smoke, only to reappear in another like steam, and it doesn't matter which side of the curtain she began on.
    No one knows who the woman in red is, but they respect her, and some hate her, and some love her. Love her as a hope that someday they will be able to cross the curtain. 
    For now only she can step under the blade of rain and come out whole on the other side. She crosses and keeps her secret; then, before the barrel of her gun rotates through one round, crosses again. 

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