Silk

The Gift of Nature

          THE PEOPLE only ever speak of this place in whispers. As if the sand which sifts here without pause, without purpose, is a fantastical thing. I suppose I spoke of it in that same way before. It is the only way you can speak of a place like this until you've gone. Well, I've gone. But I ought to tell you what they say of this place before they've gone.

          The flat-headed men and their teeming wives, the children and the mystics of Poshti, they've taken to calling it the green desert. But this land is not one of greenery. It sits on the edge of the world like a hollow breath, a dry, desert wasteland with the kingdom Narave as its neighbor. And though its skies are always blue, its conditions are never joyous. This is a steady desert; often lacking eyes that linger, or noises that startle. It is a desert which turns souls away and sends them back from whence they came. But I am not to be mistaken-there are surely people here. Yes, small emaciated fractures of people with their lives crackling out of them quickly, yet trickling as rainwater does. I have found one or two like this, and in any instance where I had turned my head away then looked back upon them, the last of their crackling had been snuffed.

          I keep the things they cannot take with them to the other side. The thin man by the burly, weathered, boulder wore a vastly thinner sun-hat with fringed edges akin to straw. His flesh was dry with death. The sun had done a number; his fingers were stringy and hotter in certain places. I regretted having touched them, but you can never help checking to see whether they're still living. Even if the bone is already starting to show. Even after the third or fourth time stumbling across a man like them. I press their eyelids shut-the ones that still have them-knowing those too will melt away in patches, wither away like leaves do during the middling season of autumn.

          First light was a fast-drawn blanket, though one which could not lay me bare to cold, only to heat. The remembrance always strikes suddenly as the night gives way to the day. It is always how I know to wake come morning-time, how I know the sun has begun to rise. The heat swelters all about my body until I can rest no longer. Thus rising, I choke on the swollen air. This is that deity which keeps the villagers from coming. This is the god which rules the desert. In Poshti the mystics swore that the sun is the lone killer which roams the green desert. Now I know that what they spake was true. Because even the cacti waver in this heat. Their knees now are ashen, the colors of the desert sand at night as it rolls up in gentle plumes of bone-smoke under the indigo sky. And my eyes have hardly ever fallen on those creatures known to linger most casually in hot desert regions. Though, when in rarity sighted, they appear greyer and duller than the sand itself-arachnids with bodies the size of shoreline pebbles, small, scraggly coyotes with frail bodies as if they flew from birth with prematurity. And never in pairs or packs; lonesome, with drab, knotted eyes. Always, we stand on opposite ends of the valley, each peering at the other. Then, as if having grown tired of life itself, the young prairie wolf saunters away with the sour limp of impending death in its legs, never once looking back to check whether it can make a meal of me.

          "Have you sent someone to tend to her chambers?"

I turned quickly, but not in an afeard fashion. I had recognized the voice as belonging to my brother, but there was a quiet and intrusive air about his entrance which stood me on edge yet.

"I expected you sooner," I said to him.

"And I expected you naught."

I was seated by the hearth, he lingered halfway amidst the doorway. From where I sat, I turned to him, cocking my head to the side.

"I mean no offense, but is this not the hour you typically allot for cavorting with the politicians of our time?-drinking wine from their curated vineyards and filling their ears with honey?" He asked.