by Lorette C. Luzajic
There were two things Sadie loved more than her corner perch of the bar: smoking, and turquoise. She was a wizened, spindly thing, brackish and leathery, draped in ropes and chunks of sky-blue stones and silver that were heavier than she was. Legend held she’d been quite a beauty back in the day and had traded that beauty freely to tourists and politicians for choice pieces by famed Navajo silver artisans. If you asked her up front about the veracity of such stories, she would flash her wobbly teeth at you and rasp out a retort about it being a good investment.
Other local lore told she’d long ago had a husband and a son, both of them muckers and blasters over in Bisbee, both of them long dead from sick lungs.
When a bored city slicker in search of rustic and authentic living moved in and re-opened an old miner’s drinking hole, Sadie was already an institution. That was in 1988. It was a desert town long emptied of even its ghosts by then, but city refugees from both coasts were starting to come to the area for their second lives, failed actresses from Hollywood and jaded art gallerists from New York, driven out by the impossible rents. The old crumbling tavern had been nailed shut for decades, but the first day it was dusted off and christened the Apothecary, Sadie was there, and she had never left.
The new incarnation of the Apothecary had a ridiculous menu of refreshments like orange blossom whisky and coffee vodka and craft beers infused with bergamot and raspberries. These appealed to the new kids and to the travellers, but most people, Sadie included, still ordered Old Overholt rye. A few fingers, neat, with ice on the side.
Sadie liked to roll American Spirit tobacco into cigarettes and gladly shared them with anyone who asked. You could follow her outside to puff away on top of a heap of old tires. You could smoke for hours, dazzled by the endless rippling scape of red rocks and blue above, broken by nothing for miles but the sculptural spines and pleats of the saguaro statues in the sand. Sadie liked to tell you about her favourite ornaments, show you how her massive Zuni crucifix was turquoise on one side and red coral on the other, just like the world in front of you.
If she talked too long, she would start coughing and you’d worry she might never stop. Should her companions be persons of poor taste and point out the perils of her steady diet of whisky and cigarettes, Sadie would correct you kindly. Her tobacco was organic. The holes in her lungs and her kidneys were from the white man’s poisons, same as her own men, centuries of soil saturated with uranium and arsenic from the greedy mines. And then she would shrug. Maybe it was all just the price of beauty and art, she’d say. She would show you another treasure, a cluster ring of creamy moon green stones, longer than her finger. Palomino turquoise, she’d tell you, from the mines in neighbouring Nevada. These ones are like bodyguards, healer stones, protectors.
When she started coughing again, as if she was splitting open from the inside, you’d worry she might break. But you’d be wrong.
Lorette C. Luzajic reads, writes, publishes, edits, and teaches creative writing. She is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry. She is also an internationally collected visual artist, and her lifelong passion for art history fuels most of her stories and poems. Two of her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions anthologies.
Emerge Literary Journal 