This Desert Reminds Me of You

© Alex J. Martin

We had seen, shimmering above the desert pan, a glowing man without eyes and we had begun to walk. Now rocks bite at our feet and cut at our ankles and we swim through days and burn. We have no mirrors, no diaries, nothing but hope, and we measure time in the damage it has beaten into our other's faces. The sky here is white, the sand is white, our dead skin has ceased to tan and it too is white and wrinkled as if we are not where we are but soaking too long in a bath and dreaming.

She tells me she wishes she were dead. And I smile at the thought that somewhere, years and miles away, there are others thinking the same thing, others who have water, who have food. People who's teeth are not lining their pockets from chewing shale, who's blood still runs red and bodies have fluid enough to sweat.

“Don't smile,” she says. “I can't stand it.”

I say to her, “This desert reminds me of you.”

She says, “Why?”

I say, “It's goes on and on and on and on.”

Night comes slowly. We stop to rest only in the hours when the sky is dim. Our tongues have swollen with what poisonous things we've found to eat, centipedes and spider webs strung between the bones of dead horses. We search the skeletons and everything about them for a few hundred yards. She finds a belt-buckle. I find nothing. Then night is with us, about us, in us, eating at whatever heat remains from the day. We keep walking.

We suck water from the thick stems of leafless weeds. She gets sick.

“We have to stop,” she says.

“Get over it,” I say.

She lies down and does not get over it. Nights come like cold tides and I watch her breaths curl into the world, holding in themselves their own light, like escaping plumes of soul. Day falls, then rises another darkness. I shovel wind-blown sand from her body with my shoe.

“Do you even remember why we're out here?” I ask.

She says, “Let him come to us.”

I stare at her eyes, colorless and burnt. She smiles. I lie beside her.