I was the Sheriff.

I saw the kids in my back seat, leaning on each other, and knew that when people found out that I didn’t arrest them, they would say it was because I was soft. Not that I had gone soft – was replaced gone. Because I was a woman.

Gender would come into play again as soon as they discovered that the kids were in love. The girl rested her head on the boy’s chest and her eyes, though fixed on me, had a wide, glassy full-moon quality to them. She looked tired and scared. They both looked scared.

Of course, it would be as if they had forgotten I was a woman when they had elected me Sheriff – and for the past six months that I had been Sheriff, too. There I was a sexless thing…until I made a mistake.

I wasn’t exactly sure it was a mistake. These were good kids. I knew their parents, their teachers; they got A’s. They didn’t ‘liase’ around as the housewives around these parts liked to say. Teenagers eventually did questionable things; it came from the fact that at some point, at that age, you either thought you were or didn’t want to turn into: a popular person, a witch, Juliet, your mother or crucially, your true self. And that was only the half of it – I only knew what it was like to be a girl. The boy was lying back there almost as dead as Romeo. And the way they held hands: they were on the precipice, the cruel world on their heels, with nowhere to go but down, clutching to one another, the last thing they would ever do.

My deputy – he has a face as pretty as the boy’s impossibly long fine eyelashes – calls me ‘Ma’am’. The same thing I called my mother since I was three – especially when I was three. This deputy has been nothing less than expressly polite and efficient and eager to do a good job and I want to trust him like I want a hole in my chest so that my pudding heart can leak out. Not that I would trust him more if he was a woman but still; I feel surrounded by men who want to get me like single women vying for the flying bouquet. The boy was beautiful enough to be a bride and the girl didn’t know the toll of what being a woman was…at least, not yet.

Even I was making this about sex, I hated that. I was the Sheriff. I saw things, not just for what they appeared to be but for what they were, and not just because I was paid to do that, either. Shouldn’t I have been above that?

The boy spoke and I saw myself in his eyes: a dangerous thing incapable of mercy. And yet, in the eyes of the people of this little town, incapable of anything but mercy. Because I was a woman. I could be both and neither.

I told them what I was prepared to do. The girl cried. The boy called me “Ma’am.”

Ena+Kaitch (1)

Ena Kaitch started writing proper stories when she was seventeen but has been writing practically every day since she was nine, when she still lived in the country she was born in, South Africa. She never thought she would be a writer but hopes to be worthy of the title one day. “pudding heart” is the first of her stories to be published.