In the Desert

Do you feel it? Its amazing.
The heartbeat of the world.

I stand in the desert of a thousand suns. The air is parched, the heat is incredible. Massive dunes spread for every direction as far as can see, hundreds of miles in this place. The sky between the suns is an impossibly deep purple. The sand, though bleached bone white, seems to have absorbed some of the light from these stars, so that prismatic rainbows seem caught in the act of creation within each grain.

In the distance, I just make out the form of a man. Though life seems out of place amid the dunes, his gait belies a sureness of his own existence that refuses to give way to the crystalline sands.

As I try to understand his presence in this wasteland my mind warps the sand around him, trying to make sense of this spot of life amid the dunes.

Perhaps it is a trick of my eyes, perhaps a trick of my mind, but the sand changes around him. The dunes rise up around him and seem to solidify into buildings. Between the buildings a marketplace forms, and upon the street down which he now walks is a crowd, people going about their daily business in the chaos of too many lives in one place. But the crowd I see is made up of parodies of people, faceless, fleshless. As I watch, the sands flow from this image to another, the buildings splitting into trees, the people morphing into animals of all sizes and breeds. As the sands play out the drama of nature, he walks through the trees unfazed, never turning his head to watch a wolf catch its prey, never seeing the lack of blood. The scene changes yet again, and the trees warp into the sides of a jagged cliff rising on either side of him, the animals changing again into crashing waves, and through it all he walks on, implacable.

The ocean side cliffs go out like the tide, becoming mountains which frame a valley through which runs the picturesque brook and sea of wildflowers the violent waves have become. With every image the sands take they reflect the colors of their internal rainbows, making the wildflowers shine like diamonds swaying in an imaginary breeze.

Through it all, he walks on, unsatisfied with the images the lifeless sands take for themselves.

Again the sands become the mountainous dunes, stark and merciless. He is now on the far edge of the dune crest upon which I stand, and continuing to walk toward me. Maybe his gait has changed, or maybe it had always been thus and I am just noticing, but there is a predatory way about him. Something about the look in his eye strikes a cord of fear within me, and though the primal instinct to run grips me I find my feet planted in the sands.

Staring at him and wanting to run, I see something that scares me more than him. One of the suns, like a jewel loosed from god’s grasp, begins to fall. As it strikes a dune not far from us the sand brightens and swallows the light, leaving nothing where once a star had been. But that first had been but a herald, all around us, across the entire desert the stars begin to fall from their perches in the violet sky, plummeting into the ocean of sand, to be swallowed by the lifeless dunes.

Through it all, he walks on. I stare in horror as this apparition comes at me, walking calmly through this desert where stars die as we persist.

He stops.

Standing but five steps from each other our eyes meet for what seems like hours, but can only be seconds. His eyes are the impossible violet of the sky above, and seem to pierce into my being like blades. I find myself meeting his stare against my will, as though his own gaze has caught mine within it. Even so, I still see the stars plummeting to the dessert around us. Out of the corners of my eyes I see them, tens of thousands, throwing themselves into the ravenous, lifeless sands, so many that even as they fall they must be replaced in the sky by another. Yet like it’s predecessor it too will soon submit itself to the sands below.



One star, unseen until the last, strikes us, and the world is submerged. We stand now in a void of white, encompassing all of creation for but a moment. All about us, made up of the pure white, a world lies expressed, I see the possibilities of what may have been and may yet be surrounding us, stretched across the white like the gossamer shapes which lurk behind the eyelids. As my eyes adjust the star passes through us, and I am returned to the dune top of before. The dying stars take on new horror as my eyes see now not suns being swallowed by the sands, but world within world in each of their pearl faces, hinting at what may have been. I stare at them now, my companion forgotten amid the desert of dying possibility, watching futures swallowed whole by silence’ sands.

My eyes return to the apparition before me, and though his smile brings no peace to my mind, I no longer wish to run. Some part of him I now understand, a fundamental truth concerning he and myself.