The desert air tastes like a dare tonight—dust and dusk and the lingering perfume of desperation. Silver City is not a place so much as it is a fever dream, shimmering and unsteady on the edge of reason. I arrived as I always do, a whisper at the edge of a tale, unnoticed yet unmissable.
I told myself I was merely passing through. That old lie, soft on the tongue. In truth, I came because the pull was too strong to ignore. Something here sang to me—something raw, unfinished. I felt it in the ground, thrumming like a distant drum. A story was about to be born, and I, ever the greedy voyeur, had no intention of missing the prologue.
My room overlooks the main street, a narrow perch above a livery that reeks of horses and secrets. From this height, the town unfolds like a poorly shuffled deck—saloons, brothels, clapboard shops, and the occasional church, all laid out in a gambler’s prayer. The people below move like brushstrokes—bold, careless, smudged at the edges. Life here is brief, often brutal, and clings to its participants like wet linen.
Evening settles with all the grace of a drunken preacher. Shadows stretch long over the street, and the saloons begin to exhale their perfume—tobacco smoke, cheap perfume, sweat. The music starts low: a piano reluctantly coaxed into song. Laughter follows, and the sharp punctuation of a bottle breaking. And in all that chaos, I felt him before I saw him.
Henry McCarty.
He was a spark in a powder keg, that boy. Not yet the legend, not yet Billy the Kid, just a raw, restless thing with too much light behind his eyes. The room bent around him—subtle at first, like the way water remembers a stone once tossed. But it was unmistakable. He drew focus like the pull of the moon on tides, and I, ancient and untouchable, felt myself pulled into his orbit before I’d taken a step.
He stood at the faro table, laughter clinging to his lips like the last note of a song. There was nothing remarkable about his clothes—threadbare, dusty—but he wore them like armor. His movements were water and fire—graceful, unruly. He didn’t need to try to be the center of the room; the room conspired to make it so.
He looked up—and saw me.
Not glanced. Saw. As if all this time, all these years, he’d been waiting to lock eyes with something not quite of this earth. His stare held no fear, only curiosity. Recognition, even. And that, more than anything, unsettled me.
He crossed the room with the confidence of a comet.
"Evenin'," he said. That voice. A lazy drawl soaked in sunset and mischief.
"Evening," I replied, already falling.
"Don’t believe I’ve seen you around. You new in town?"
"Just observing," I said, and the lie landed like a coin in a wishing well.
He grinned. God help me, he grinned.
"Well, you picked the right place. Silver City’s full of things worth watchin’. Some of ’em even want to be seen."
He extended his hand. "Name’s Henry. Most folks call me Billy."
I took it. Electricity. No metaphor there, just raw contact, ancient wire meeting mortal fire. It rattled through me like prophecy. There was no mistaking the impact—it echoed through my being, a low chime struck in the hollows of the universe.
"Tak," I said, my voice catching on his name like a thorn. And just like that, I was no longer a ghost. I was in it. The play had begun, and I had forgotten my lines.
We found a booth in the back, away from the card tables and chaos. The air was heavy with pipe smoke and the scent of aged wood stained by countless spilled drinks. A barmaid drifted past like a mirage with a tray full of whiskey glasses and broken dreams. He offered me one, and I took it, more for the ritual than the taste. It burned, as it should. Some truths demand a little fire.
He told stories with that reckless, golden voice—stories of silver strikes and shotgun duels, of nights under stars and mornings on the run. I listened, enraptured, not by the stories themselves but by him. His joy in telling them, the way his eyes lit with mischief and memory.
He asked nothing of me, only smiled, nudged me with questions, offered up laughter like it was something holy. I answered in riddles, in shadows, in carefully chosen metaphors. Told tales of fallen empires and whispered gods. He never blinked, never questioned. Just nodded, as if he’d expected no less.
There was a moment—brief, unremarkable to anyone else—when he reached for his glass and his fingers brushed mine. A jolt, warm and sharp, like lightning caught in silk. His gaze lifted and held. We didn’t speak. We didn’t need to. The silence bloomed between us, a space too wide to cross and too intimate to ignore.
"You make it sound like the world’s got a soul," he said at one point, tilting his head. "Even the busted-up parts."
"Maybe it does," I said. "Maybe that’s why it breaks."
He leaned closer, so close I could count the flecks of gold in his irises. “You talk like someone who’s been around a long, long time.”
I smiled. Said nothing. He didn’t push. Mortals rarely get close enough to press those questions, and the ones who do… they tend to leave echoes in me. Echoes and names I don’t speak aloud anymore.
He launched into another tale then, about a prospector who struck silver only to bury it again, convinced the mine was cursed. He gave it texture—voice, motion, sorrow and glee, like a man born to weave yarns out of dust and pain. And maybe he was. Maybe all this time, the myths had been waiting on someone like him to stitch them back together.
The piano faltered. Someone in the corner was crying into their drink, and two card players were inching toward bloodshed. But we remained in our little eddy of calm, the world churning around us as if reluctant to disturb the moment.
We stayed like that, two constellations drifting toward alignment, until the saloon thinned out and the piano gave up its last melancholic sigh. He didn’t invite me to follow him when he left, and I didn’t need the invitation. Some stories are meant to be walked into.
The door creaked shut behind him. His boots echoed on the boardwalk, sharp as a gunshot in the lull between songs. And still I sat there, hand resting on the smooth, still-warm glass, tasting the sweetness of his smile and the danger beneath it.
That was the night I stopped being an observer. That was the night everything began.
That was the night I met Henry McCarty, the man who would be Kid—and forgot how to let go.
