Page 1 of Sexting the Cowboy
1
ANNIE
The first thingthat happens when I turn off the highway is that the world goes coppery brown.
Dust pours up under my tires and rolls across the hood like a tide I can’t outrun. It freckles the windshield even with the wipers going, and by the time I snake past a line of pickups and trailers toward the back gate of the Sandy Fairgrounds, I can taste grit on my tongue. It mixes with saliva into a filmy paste.
Utah, a month before autumn. Warm enough to not need a jacket, unless the wintry mood strikes, and all hell breaks loose. But the forecast says we’re in a continuation of summer, not due for a preview of an actual season quite yet.
Welcome to the Old West Fest—A Month of Rodeo, Rides, and Recklessness!—the banner at the main entrance announces in fat, cheerful letters when I pull in. They might as well have hung a sign that says:Annie Pearl’s Penance. Thirty Days. No Early Release.
I ease my SUV into the slot markedMedicbeside a white canopy held together by faith and duct tape. Thankfully, I get to parkaway from the crowd, so I don’t have to wade through a sea of humanity to get here. A sagging red cross banner flaps the entry. Two industrial fans at the entrance push the same hot air from one side of the tent to the other.
Small favors, I suppose.
Past them, the grandstands rise with bleachers already peppered by people staking their spots. To the left, a Ferris wheel turns slow as a second hand. To the right, chutes clang, and the ground vibrates with the kind of bellow you feel in your bones. The midway stretches out past where I can see, the scent of fried goodness mixing with horse and bull stench.
I let my forehead drop to the steering wheel for exactly one breath. In, out. Then I sit up and smooth my face. I signed the contract. I cashed the deposit. I’m here.
“Ready?” Jaden asks, already unbuckled, a clipboard balanced on one knee. He’s impossible not to like—clean-shaven, kind mahogany eyes, ball cap shoved backward over his shaved head, with warm brown skin and a smile that somehow survives long shifts and ugly scenes. He’s thirty-two and organized to a degree that borders on spiritual practice. If the world ends, I want him in charge of triage.
“I’m breathing,” I say, which is as close as I’m willing to get to honesty this second.
He grins. “Big day for the lungs.”
“Don’t get smart,” I mutter, but my mouth twitches.
We climb out. Heat slaps me, the kind that leaches moisture from your skin. I’ve lived in Utah since childhood, but my body has never adjusted. I still slather myself with lotion twice a day.Dust finds my scrub collar, my eyelashes, the creases of my knuckles.
One day, I’ll leave this town.
But not today.
The fairground is a moving picture—kids in boots galloping toward the midway with snow cones already melting down their fists, mothers dragging wagons full of coolers, men in pearl snap shirts shouldering saddles like they weigh nothing. A kettle corn stand roars to life, the smell of sugar and oil so thick it nearly turns my stomach. On the loudspeakers, the announcer clears his throat, hits a long “Y’all,” and then starts reading off sponsors in a drawl polished to a sheen.
I hated rodeos long before I had a reason to, but now the reasons have a name.
I slam the door a little too hard and pop the back hatch. We unload in practiced silence. The hard-sided trauma cases, a soft cooler that will be full of meds in fifteen minutes and water two minutes after that because everyone will forget to drink, my portable ultrasound that cost more than my car, IV poles, and a roll of duct tape because tents and chaos both require tape.
Inside, the medic tent is bare bones. Three cots line the left wall, vinyl shining under the washed-out light. A folding table hunkers at the back. Someone left a plastic tote of supplies for us—Ace wraps, a few bottles of ibuprofen, a box of Band-Aids meant for paper cuts and scrapes. I don’t trust any of it, so I set my own cases on the table and get to work. I clip a red sharps container to a pole; it snaps home with satisfying certainty.
Jaden angles the fans so they cross-breeze the cots and scrawls a sign with a thick black marker: FREE WATER • FREE SHADE• FREE SMILES with a lopsided smiley face. He tapes it over a stack of paper cups. “Cots prepped?”
“Do it. Hang two one-liter bags—saline and LR. Spike the lines. Keep the clamps on.”
“Copy.”
It still makes me happy when he answers like that.
He moves like an efficiency tutorial: clean, quick, calm. While he works, I lay out meds in neat rows—acetaminophen, ibuprofen, ketorolac, ondansetron, a locked box of what I hope we won’t need—and tape triage sheets to clipboards: name, event, mechanism, vitals, interventions, disposition. I print a heat-illness algorithm and tape it where it’ll be in my eyeline when my brain wants to sprint, then tape the Spanish version beside it. I put the ultrasound in the shade and plug the battery in even though I charged it last night, because the only sure thing about batteries is that they lie.
The ritual steadies me. It’s the only thing that will get me through this month.
Outside, the festival wakes up for real. Vendors flip their signs to OPEN. The Ferris wheel speeds up a fraction. A kid in a stitched-up straw hat drags a rope through the dirt and hums, tangled in the kind of happiness that only lives in summer. The animal smell is a layered thing—warm hide, hay, shit—and it moves on the wind in pockets, rolling over the midways and dipping under the grandstands. A bull slams a horn into a panel, and the metal sings. Every clatter yanks a string inside me I wish I’d cut years ago.
“Hey,” Jaden says, soft. “Water?”
I realize I’ve been holding my breath and let it out slow. “Yeah. Thanks.”
