Oasis

It was bad enough to be stationed as an officer in the middle of nowhere town of Khurpas, but what really made Shefik grit his teeth was being requisitioned as additional backup to the nearby village of Jarem, which was two steps past nowhere. Shefik had always thought of himself as a city man, but he was more akin to a city rat - living in the parts of the city reserved for the labor, the poor, and the abandoned. The best you could do being born in those circumstances was hope to be a police officer, a secret Shefik had stumbled onto after years of bouncing around jobs. That was about as close one got to wielding any real power.

Life was simple for Khurpasi people, and power was even simpler. There was a clear hierarchy, and everyone stepped on the person below them. It was a cultural joy, an accepted part of living in society, and the only way to not participate was to get out. Shefik knew as well as any other city rat though, that these places had a gravity that was hard to escape. Terminal velocity tended to be, well... terminal. And so it was that Shefik begrudgingly chewed some betel leaf leaning against the barricade placed on the main road leading out into the barren plains and beyond it the border in the desert sea. The other end of this road led into a mountain, on the other side of which stood Khurpas, so close yet so remote. While the town had had some modernity reach it in the past 50 years, the village of Jarem had actively resisted it, as if evolution was on the wind and blocked by the mountain, leaving the village just as barren as the plains beyond it.

"Managing sand rats. Goddamn it. Only worse fate is being a sand rat." Barlam spit into his paper cup and threw it away. A dog ran up from nearby and started licking it.

"Five carriages since morning, that's all we've had. Everyone's already in the village for the fete." The city rat pointed out grimly.

"Yeah, if anything we should be there. They might need more help there. All the action's there, or at least near all the rat camps."

Shefik merely grumbled. He shouldn't be in this village, this town, this province, he thought. Barlam couldn't see past his own day, and he was plenty satisfied living like that. You gave him two morsels instead of one and he'd be grateful, gleefully oblivious to the feast that you had going just out of the corner of his eye. Shefik couldn't believe he was the same as the likes of Barlam in the eyes of strangers.

A sixth carriage trotted up the road from the plains, a girl on it and a man on the side walking with its reins. Barlam stood stall and walked with swagger along the barricade now as the carriage halted and spurred with disinterest.

"What's your business?" He spun a wooden baton in his hand.

"Trading supplies at the fete, senior." the man croaked. He talked with his head down, as a child would to his father, even though Barlam was much closer to the girl in age, or perhaps the camel, than him.

"Fete started days ago, where have you been all this time? Why come now? How long are you staying?... " Balram asked the routine pointless questions that were made to harass and not be answered.

Shefik meanwhile rounded the carriage, pretending to inspect it, although his mind wandered and it registered nothing he saw in the carriage. These people were not likely to be devious, deceptive, and capricious in the way that malicious people were. They might smuggle in some hash, a bit of other fluff contraband, nothing they wouldn't get away with by offering a bribe and eating their pride.

He came round and regarded the girl. She was quiet as a mouse, dress in tatters hung loosely around her weak shoulders, collarbones sticking out. A gentle nudge and it'd fall off of her and possibly dissolve into the earth. Her breasts were unremarkable and hips curved only slightly, with legs he assumed correctly had nothing inviting about them. And yet, this sand rat with the cracked skin and matted hair that aroused his curiosity along with a sudden burst of emotion (that he didn't show, of course). It was her eyes that incited it, he realized, grey and striking like a cheetah's in the night, observing prey. Yet there was warmth there too. A genuine invitation, or perhaps the calling of a siren.