Sands shift under footsteps with no owner, the soft weightless crunch of a wanderer in the desert. In the distance she hears the sounds of home: overlapping conversations and laughter, clinking cups, the soft thump of music carrying in the still night air. The sounds of home have been the same since the dawn of time, since the first peoples meandered through these lands and lowered anchors sprawled, scattered, across the speckled sea of creosote bushes and Joshua trees. The desert teems with more life than is readily perceptible. One has to sit and listen, maybe she’s more attuned to catching the whispers of life living – she’s heard them passing through time. They all sound the same, you know? Conversations, laughter, libations, music. Humans gather in the solitude of the desert to build their tribes, share their resources, to mark their territory with voices, clinks, thumps, in the great deafening silence of the desert.
“Despite this vastness, we exist!” they cry. Humans gather in the solitude to feel less alone. They’d know they’re not, if they’d only sit and listen. So she walks toward, her shape forming slowly upward against the light.
She’s been to this house before, she remembers a time before they had power and on a relentless desert night, the boy she hoped to make hers closed his eyes huddled to keep his warmth his own and not the night’s. As he shivered exhausted from shaking, fell asleep with his head on her warm shoulder. How cold he’d been, how pressed together all the bodies of the visitors of turn. How frozen the night, how warm their bond. By the morning she realized this boy had no intentions of being hers (he was God’s and his wife’s!) and so she vanished up the mountain into the sunrise, leaving only soft, shifting, footprints behind her.
She’s been to this house before, she remembers a time before they had running water, how she’d lead the men on the mules to the stream for a drink of liquid life. They thanked someone called Mary for the moisture that quenched their dying thirst, how rude.
She’s been to this house before, she remembers a time before they set up the hut in the back. How hot it had been then, with no respite from the sun! She remembers a young woman fainting, so all her friends had to go. What a shame to be left alone again when they were all having such a perfectly nice time.
“Who are you riding back with?” a beautiful man had the mind to stop and ask, realizing all cars but his had already driven out.
“Oh, I came out here with some people but now they’re gone,” she replied and the sand shifted under her feet as she walked away, merging with the creamsicle sunset until one could almost swear that the sand was shifting under no one’s weight.