A valley of darkness swept across the field, like wisps of smoke, howling grey wisps of smoke against the back light of blue and red twinkling stars. It was all there was to this world, the darkness and the light up there, haunting and yet calming, together a message for the subconscious. She stared at it for awhile, without regard to this world and the nothing that it was, pulling her robes closer as the trails left prints in the bodice that was sand. She was drowning in black, the black that was the night, the black that was the desert as it spread far and wide across her, and the blacks that were her robes, her cloaks, her tattered flowy garments that she clutched onto with the arrival of the night and pulled along behind her with daybreak. It was at once her saviour, from the chills of the desert, the biting cold winds that the night unleashed, and it was her baggage, her only remnant of the life she no longer remembered.
She trudged along the sand, her soles blistered, her feet bruised, each step towards a destiny that she was not really aware of. But she walked, as though something called her, an unknown force from beyond; it pulled her closer, each day just a little bit closer as her parched thoat cried out for water, her stomach wanted food and her body all but gave up on her. There was that voice, that calm voice at the back of her head, the voice that was more of music than any word, that she somehow knew and understood, that told her to move along. Move blindly on the path, past the land of scarabs and the land of doom like it was called. And she did, each day telling herself that the end was near and that she would reach that voice, that stranger that dwelled in her soul. It was just that, just that calling that she felt, that kept her going, that for all might have been hallucination, a figment of imagination, a lost mind scrambling with broken pieces of a life long lost, but she knew it was something.
And it really was all there was, besides her cloaks. So she moved with each passing day, her face sunken, her eyes screaming for sleep that she would not allow, if not in fainting alongside some tall mountain and waking up to bruises on her hand, blood dripping from the cuts as the sand spread over her wounds and glittered with the scorching rays of the sun. She fed on it, her wounds, and the tasteless sand, bit those tiny granules that were everywhere, that were gold and that were black. Could a desert really be black, she wondered with the morning. The mornings when the sky was above her and the sand below her, mornings when she saw color splashed across the horizon and she remembered the greens and the greys, the purples and the pinks, the blues and then the blues, because there were so many of them, the blue. And she loved them, all that color and she ran to them, towards that sun that teased and fled, fled to some other country, as she ran forgetting all her pain, or the lack of energy, ran till the sun was lost and she fell. Fell to the darkness that consumed her soul and her being with the arrival of that night. And then, she trudged. Her wounds alive again, her feet aching again, her hands roughened against the cold and her cheeks, red and hollow as the wind left scars, scars and tangled messes of her long black mane.
It went on for days, this going and this wanting and this wandering. Days that were years to her. Till came that hour, when the body could no longer, would no longer listen to the mind. And she was lying there, facing the sand, eating the sand and willing herself to turn, to face those lights that were her friend and her enemy and she did all, but move, her imagination seeing flashes of everything. The mountains that she had woken up to with no recollection, the jagged edges that had cut her, the one tall cactus that she had met, that she had stared at and wished to tear at. She had almost touched it, till realisation dawned with a prick and she wondered how they had drank from it. She didn't know who, she didn't know what, but she knew and this knowing was unlike the voice, this knowing was real. She remembered the smoke, that grey strand of smoke that had shrieked in her ears and she had shuddered, that had circled her before it had left, that had left her spine tingling and her being scared and about to give up. She remembered that insect which scurried away, that was on her hand because it had itched, that was black like the night and she wondered why she had not fed on it. But something had told her to stay away and she had.
Not that there was any difference. She knew she was dying, she knew with every particle of sand that filled her, that it was the end and she had not met the voice and she had not achieved all that she was meant to. She had not conquered this desert, this paradox of life, this cold being that was warmer than an embrace, this endless plain that left no footprints, this infinity that was swallowed by the night. She remembered not knowing, and finding herself on this journey and she remembered her friends and she turned. Suddenly, she turned, just a slight bit, so that her face was against the sky, and her eyes peaked into the night, those twinkling lights. She smiled, or thought she did.
There was a message in that, those stars that created a pattern. And it was a strange, for this night, this one night, it seemed as though a light appeared from somewhere, a silver incandescence that the stars themselves were unaware of, and it made everything so much clearer, so much more surreal and so much more real. She looked at the pattern and she knew it, finally she knew it, and she heard the music float all around her and she knew she was there. She had finally reached. There was that music, that music that had kept her going and now finally it was there, as a figure stooped ahead of her, the profile tall and imposing, dressed in robes as though a traveler of the deserts, white large eyes staring at her, long fingers clasping something and then clasping her frail wrists and she smiled, this time for real and she looked once more at the stars as the figure, the solitary figure in the desert, let her go and walked away.
Somewhere out there, the moon sighed, it had returned. |
Submission Name: That Streak of Silver.
