Fragments from the Vault #013: It All Goes to Hell at Prospector Saloon

At a crossroads where all ends of the earth converge...

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Game: Fallout: New Vegas

Location: The Wastelands

More information: Prospector Saloon | Fallout Wiki | Fandom 

A lone rest stop. Photo credit: FetchQuester

At high tide in the Mojave

Where the radroaches chime 

In the pantheon of their bleached uranium mesas,

I shed my skin and leave the pulp 

Of my traumas behind

To baptise parched lips with the nectar of longing,

By the stale of the tumbleshack lanterns 

That are mining the depths

At Prospector Saloon.

(There's a catch at the bar whose smouldering eyes glisten 

As throaty guitars peel off grime-charcoaled chords -

And cardinal sins lived by windswept young women

Have her in their minds with their heels on the boards).

And I'm swathed in the ache 

Of an hour's shadow or two,

Cooling off in a corner of reflective abandon

And thumbing the edge of my last rust-crowned cap;

Wondering which tawdry junction among the scrapyard refuse 

She'll scour for salvation

With the world in her holster,

And whose throat she'll spill softly

When their soul fails the chaos of all that she sows.

(But she'll take off for sunrise, her trail a lost archive

That sputters the tread of a Wastelander's steel,

Catching a box to the green haze of Salem

Where the acid-speared Children of Atom once kneeled.)

The Mojave Desert. Photo credit: FetchQuester

I bore it like Atlas among ashes and railroads,

And should I rise from the swell of the corrugated fortress

To the quake of a Death Claw you'll know that I've found 

The tall gates of reckoning -

Scrolled from a hangover of Geiger-blown bourbon

I've scavved from the vaults of our pre-War seers

Who left us to drown, feet-up, in the pale.

(And when she's done shaking out Good Neighbor's captors

She'll ride with the FMS Northern Star II -

And when orchards fall glowing of atom-hued chattel

The Nightwatch awakens to old city blues.)

The terminal's raining a maelstrom of codex;

Though I'm poised for the next great Commonwealth epoch

Long is the orbit that drivels my sleep.

Look to the West, past the Potomac River - 

One stake in the breast and one gambled reckless

I'm lured by the signal of revenant crossroads,

Knowing the threads that once tied us have come to a head.

(And just as the Institute round up their stimpaks

She'll launch them back home to their longitude sky,

Winding her way back to bottles and bootlegs

At Prospector Saloon where the spirit runs dry.)

And I'm swathed in the ache 

Of an hour's shadow or two,

Cooling off in a corner of reflective abandon

And thumbing the edge of my last rust-crowned cap;

But this time she lingers -

And maybe I'll mention

How my throat will spill softly 

When my soul fails the beauty of all chaos she sows.

Midnight hangout: Prospector Saloon. Photo credit: FetchQuester

- Lucy A.

***

Sources: 

Fallout: New Vegas (Obsidian Entertainment/Bethesda Softworks), Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Fallout 76 (Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks); fandom.com. 

*Dedicated to those who'd make the apocalypse fun.