This month's Moon Prize, the 113th, goes to Donna Dallas's stunning story "Habitat."

HABITAT

by Donna Dallas

She rides with her pack of wolves on black Harley's. Yellow unkempt hair under a bowl-shaped helmet, flowing over solid shoulders and apple breasts. Her stained-glass makeup covers up days of reckless riding. A blue flame to match her blue eyeshadow. She burns, her heat cannot be contained and that is why she rides. Animal girl, slicked in leather passed down through heavy mileage. A long line of followers wait to share her bike. She can’t have a man without breaking him and when he’s broke, she rides alone.

She smokes cigarettes through her cherry lips with her leather legs spread apart and her beer resting in between. She pees out there in the wilderness, eyes like ripe blueberries, scanning her terrain. She has a tattoo of Jesus Christ on her right arm. Jesus guides her when she fixes her bike. Jesus flexes and stretches on her arm when she works her tools on the bikes’ engine. She knows how to work every part. Her daddy was a biker and she’s traveled more miles than a monarch butterfly.

Daddy raised her on the back of his bike and when she could see over the clutch, he put her on her own. When he died, she sat with him in Washington’s Crossing. She took his place and took his bike. He taught her to move free, a leather panther treading the wild gravel, new leader of the pack. Ode to daddy, never let civilization cut her wheels and contain her habitat.

She won’t stay put for very long. The voices of her people carry over the asphalt of Interstate 66. Her band grows bigger. Laden with leather and worn denim, their primal urge to ride. Animal lust courses through their blood and their scent spreads across the camp like heat out of a furnace. They roll around the devil’s fire, growling through the crackling red flames. Their skins are one and they believe there is no other life truer than theirs.

Her thoughts wander along the black veins of smoke, drifting lazily into the moons’ belly. She recalls a small house in a town she left back east. The man with the crisp clothes and the honey bronzed skin. The one who softened her body to suede. Tamed girl, silly from long kisses that slowed her down and down and melded her into an orb of blue heat. No makeup needed, no leather, just skin wrapped in the scent of his body.

She left one morning before the sun rose, before the bronze god awoke. She heard the roar of the motorcycles, the chanting engines. The walls became too close and the bed too soft for her. Daddy’s breath floated along the carbon monoxide. The air tightened up and she could not breathe any longer unless it was along the wind from her bike in motion. She knew if she stayed, she would lose her freedom, that’s what daddy told her. Never let them tame you. So, she keeps moving, on the bike, with her pack.

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Donna Dallas has appeared in a plethora of journals, most recently The Opiate, Beatnik Cowboy, Tribes, Horror Sleaze Trash and Fevers of the Mind. She is the author of Death Sisters, her legacy novel, published by Alien Buddha Press. Her first chapbook, Smoke and Mirrors, launched in 2022 with New York Quarterly. Donna serves on the editorial team of NYQ. donnaanndallas@gmail.com

@DonnaDallas15