The Estranged Mindless Delights: A Collection of Short Stories

When the Dust Settles

Copyright ©Lee Luna 2014

When the Dust Settles

As a child, your vision seems to saturate the colors that swerve around you. The world is large, as though your iris have been implanted with magnifiers that stare dazedly into the sky with absolute wonder. The sky is not the limit and the earth appears to be an endless dream for it has land drifting far into the distance.

I had just arrived back from Texas, hoping to visit my family and to visit all my old childhood haunts that tend to appear in my dreams. Some individuals might say that a desert isn’t a beautiful place. That tall trees and ever wild greens with picturesque fall backgrounds and chilly winters were the places to be.

 In a way, they may be right since nothing could beat watching the leaves turn during a festive autumn. Yet, Arizona was different in a sense that it had other things than just a desert. There were mountains that soared high and at times could be seen with a white pearlescent peek during the winter. If one were to travel up north, you would find Sedona, a gorgeous little city surrounded by rose tinted earth that appeared aflame when the sunlight leaps over the rocks.

I had expected to witness all this and more, to refresh my memory with old sights that usually bring me such comfort.

However, the place I now stood in did not reflect that once childlike wonder. The feeling was wrong. The land that once stretched out before me in the hot Arizona desert has shortened in length. What was once a vast span of fields of cotton and endless red dust now runs with stucco, chicken wired suburbs that stick out against the silhouette of the dark mountain landscape.

Sceneries that I could once vision with such clear precision from my youth seemed to evaporate at an alarming rate.

A childhood was burned to the ground that day, and the world was shrinking. Realization was setting in and I was forced to watch it all in a silent daze.  

II

My mother had been the one to introduce me to becoming environmentally aware. Whether it was intentional or not, I found myself relying on documentaries and stories that forever tantalized my young mind with impressions of a beautiful and untouched wild world that laid just beyond my sight.

 I constantly dreamed of saving endangered species, hoping to find a way to help protect what was now slowly disappearing.  I would often find myself daydreaming when I was little, fondly staring out from the top of my dust covered playground and just imagine with my heart and soul of the possibilities of what I could accomplish.

I dare to think that I had a chance against poachers, thinking of ways that I could trick them and somehow escaping the animals in my steed. 

Then, as though someone had a switch on a light, my daydreams seem to disperse into wicked flames. While I was busy figuring out the possibilities for the future, I did not take account for what was happening in my own home town.

Dust was lifted up from the air, piling high into the skies as roars of mechanical arms ripped through the rocky foundation that made up the land around us. Large bland buildings with diverse consumer goods started to spread like wild fire out in the little country side, taking over the natural earth with boiling black liquid that slowly spread over the ground.

At first, it started gradually, over taking my mind with such ease that it seemed to blink like an alarming red light that refused to remove itself from my vision. It came in forms of houses that carved themselves into the beautiful mountain walls, searing it with of dull pale bricks that littered its body like a sort of fungal disease.

The valley seemed to grow small, the buildings spreading out from the city as a dismal metallic gray crept over the rose colored rocks until nothing but strange palm trees and non-native grass took roots within the abused soil. People, who seemed to crawl into the urban areas like ants, stretched their legs and families into the outer limits of the clasping bodies of the mountain tops.

Asphalted speared though the large rocky forms, leaving visible lines that now make a clear path though the mountains body. Some roads wound themselves around the rocks, coiling and twisting their forms as they constricted the color and natural shape of the land to something unrecognizable.

I felt as though bit and pieces of me were dying right before my eyes. The realization of the beauty of the land was now just slowly decaying before me left an emptiness that would no doubt consume my thoughts.

III

A part of me had known this was changing, but upon returning, it was just devastating to see it happen so quickly. In another few years, I dare to wonder what else will be gone from my sight.

Water is not abundant in Arizona, yet it was something we desperately depended on. It had been one of the reasons my mother had decided to leave this place. She realized that soon, my home state may very well face a crisis at some point.  

Dams made by the hands of man bring us what we so desire, but I know it will not last. Too many have already occupied the city, which left us to search for alternatives to solve this growing problem. 

However, these solutions can only be temporary, since time itself has proven that not all things are always permanent. Seeing the smog overhead, I could very well see that we are not even close to fixing our carbon footprint.

Over time, items only found on this little sphere disappear into a void of gray. What lies on the ground with such vibrancy rusts and deteriorates before clouded senses. Many will go unaware; their eyes shielded by vision of the present, promises of a fair day scream ahead while the silent echoes in the far distance will never reach inattentive ears.

 My Arizona was disappearing, and it seemed only pictures of the past will be all that remain of the spender it once held.

All Rights Reserved ©RavenToMidnights

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Here is my last writing project I had to do in nonfiction creative writing last year. In this exercise I had to try and mimic the writing style of another writer out of a small list that my teacher provided. I choose Annie Dillard due to her wondrous ability with words and diction. Her story “Total Eclipse” was amazing and transported me through her emotions and the feeling of watching an eclipse as well as using other images to paint her opinions on certain subjects. It seems in the end that my own writing style took over, but I’m ok with how it turned out.