Devil's Width, New Texas was not a pleasant place to live.  It was hot in the summer, slightly less hot in the winter, was just far enough from the coast to get its ass kicked by hurricanes without the final mercy of being wiped off the map.  Devil's Width was a curiosity in every sense of the word.  It was a tiny town of roughly one hundred people.  It was the capital of New Texas, the tiniest nation nobody bothered looking up.  It wasn't even the smallest nation in the world; it was just lost like a ghost town despite having a thriving tourist trade (sometimes people stopped for directions) and a great deal of export (the local Pizza Hut, also the only chain restaurant in town, was technically U.S. soil; in the same sense, Devil's Width also had a safe and respected foreign embassy).  There were other anti-benefits (what some of the fancier folks called "detriments"); most saliently, they had zero federal protection from, say, Mexico.

New Texas seceded from the Confederate States of America when the locals decided they just didn't like slavery that much.  It was the sight of marvelous border struggles and fleeing slaves for a few glorious years.  Then the war ended and the universe stopped caring.  The whole universe.  The final sermon in the town's only church (now its only Pizza Hut) was "God's Pretty Much Done With Angel's Length."  The town's citizens were practicing heretics; they believe in God, but thought Him a jerk for not paying attention to them.  They named the town Devil's Width in protest.

For most its life as Devil's Width, the tiny nation of New Texas simply went on, being annoyed with God and celebrating Begrudging Christmas and Ironic Easter and cursing every single hoop they had to leap through in order to visit their families in Sensible, Texas, fifty miles as it was that way (indicates).  But one day, the siege began.

Today, swore Root Clarence, it would end.

The wind blew hot and dry from the south.  Tidal waves of sand crashed into the schoolhouse, under the thresholds of doors, in cracks in the windows.  The sandstorms were always first.  The men and the women and Hermaphrodite Billy-Anna and the children cowered and whispered, planning what to do now, how to placate the raiders.  It was agreed: the coward's way out.  There was always the coward's way out.

In time the waves ebbed to a stream, and the stream to a trickle.  Families fled, arm-in-arm, carrying the most precious urns and fluids to the Pizza Hut.  That was Stateland.  The raiders never touched it; ordered pizza, in fact, with the money stolen from the people of Devil's Width.  They ate their hand-tossed pepperoni lover's with unfettered glee, taunting their enemies with thin-crust supremes and breadsticks.  The Oreo Dippers were new.  Of course the raiders would feast upon them, the lost souls of Devil's Width forced to watch, bellies too numb and twisted to accept even a gram of such rich delicacy.  Was nothing safe?  Nothing sacred?  The old men, who had seen it so many times before, accepted their fate--the inevitable swish of dust-slapped cloaks, the accented orders for so-and-so pizzas and breadsticks and even salads.  What of the pastas?  The new ones?  The people knew the commercials by heart.  Surely the invaders would order the pastas.  Those fiends.

This fiction is brought to you in part by Pizza Hut.  Pizza Hut: It Certainly Has Pizza(tm).

Root Clarence took to the roof of his house.  He adjusted the straps of his backpack, checked his great-grandfather's cavalry sword.  It was sharp as the first time it cleft the head from the neck of Runcible Spoon, cruelest of the forgotten Southern generals.  Would it last in a stress test?  Not the sword; the sword was forged of purest standard-issue military steel.  It would last through any stress standard-issue military steel could weather.  His new weapon might very well have a stroke and die in the middle of combat; the backpack old, made of poorly-tanned leather, bought secondhand from a leprous gypsy who later disappeared in a plume of salt, the backpack itself strapped around a medium-small boiler.  In flight, it was temperamental.  He never had the opportunity to test it in a fight.  It was risk he had to take.  Who else could, in the face of such strange troubles?

A few watched.  The love of his life, precious Money "For" Nothing, for instance.  Her hair would've lashed in the breeze had she any hair to speak of.  Chemo did a number on her; in the end she tore the cancer out with nothing but nails and teeth.  The doctors gave her a round of applause and complimentary napkin.  She had eyes full of hope.  For her, he would take death and victory at once.  Failure was not on the itinerary.  For her, and for the proud, inconvenienced people of Devil's Width, there would never be another day of loss.

They swooped in, inevitable as a funnel cloud.

Can you see them?--their sombreros pulled low over their faces, the bandannas tied over their faces, their colorful ponchos billowing in the breeze.  They crested the horizon, zoomed toward the town.  They carried with them the sound of countless buzzing hornets.  They flew, each of them, for they wove the soul of the wind into their cloaks as sure as they did many-colored beads.  They roared, their battle-cries echoing like thunder.

Only one chance.  For home, for honor.  For love.  Root drew his father's welding/wedding goggles (a strange tradition, that, one unique to the troubled folk of New Texas--a story for another time).  He kissed them on each lens, scrubbed the marks off with his sleeve.  He strapped them on; they were heavy with a certain destiny.  With the new weapon he could meet his foes; with the old weapon he could cut them down.  With his father's goggles, with Money's eyes upon him, with the glorious oddity of Devil's Width in his shadow, he could not be defeated.

Root pulled the cord on his backpack.  Its mighty thrusters murmured, then sang in throaty Gregorian harmony.  His coal-powered jetpack sent him aloft on inky plumes of smoke; sword in hand, he met the Flightxicans with the rage Devil's Width held quivering in its heart for sorrowful decades.  The twelve saw his challenge; with words of power burning on their lips, they met him in combat.

Justice rained that day like a soothing spring shower; in its passing bloomed peace and joy and love and extra-large pizza.

Devil's Width is yet to be officially recognized as a state.  In the Pizza Hut of yore now hang the twelve sombreros of the twelve banditos.  It still takes more time than necessary to visit relatives in Sensible.  But those trophies made the troubles light as a badge of pride.