strata

I wake to the glowing red interior of my eyelids, hair hot against scalp. I open my eyes and shut them again. The harsh sun burns my face. I sit up, shade myself with my hand, and realize I am surrounded by desert. Kingdom of the sun, I see it all around. The sun's hot will bleaching the rocks, compelling every living thing to scurry from shade to shade for fear of combustion. I look behind me and, at the top of a nearby dune, I see the wavering image of an approaching figure in a black turban holding a long wooden staff. The figure raises its head and reveals a weather-beaten face with a black patch over one eye and a bushy white moustache. My whole body clenches and whispers to me This man is dangerous. I want to run, but there's no hiding place in this endless expanse. He stares down at me and opens his mouth, and his voice thunders across the dunes as if the dry air longed to be filled by it. He speaks in an ancient tongue I cannot understand or have forgotten. He points past me and I turn to see my parents approaching, stumbling over the dunes, eyes red from tears or maybe the winds. They beg me through cracked lips to return home with them. Confused and touched, I open my mouth to speak, but the man's booming laughter interrupts me and I watch my parents deflate, their skin folding in on itself. Weightless, they float to the sand, and a spider crawls from my mother's sagging mouth, digs a hole in the sand, and buries itself. A breeze sweeps them up, and they fly limply toward my head like two streamers. I duck, and they float past into the sleeve of the laughing man's robe, and he lowers his arm. He speaks again, passionate spit flying from his mouth, and I can only stare, slack-jawed and shaking. I try to run, but he raises his staff and strikes the ground with its knotted end, and sparks of lightning flash from the point of impact, and the desert shakes as a great wave ripples out, lifting the sand like a bedsheet. I fall, and the settling sands cover my legs. I struggle to escape as the man approaches, reaching into his turban and producing an ornate hand mirror with golden frame. H holds it out, and I have to look. In the mirror is a face, stretched by gravity, skin peppered with sun spots and wrinkles, hair white and wispy. It is undeniably me but also the man before me. Frustrated, I push the mirror away, but he grips my skull with his rough hand and a flood of emotions bombard my senses: lust, passion, blind release, the sting of regret, the horror of a reflection, a fortifying force overcoming the horror, scarred devotion, protection at all costs, vigilance, feverish nights of rumination and doubt, strategizing, anticipating, all for me. Yes, all for me. And this sequence crashes over and over, receding into the infinite past like the endless reflections of two mirrors facing one another. I pull myself back into the present. The man, the turban, within: the shining hilt of a knife. I reach and grab the handle and plunge the blade deep into him, and he releases his grip and falls, and I straddle him, stabbing and stabbing. And withdrawing the blade, I pause and a drop of blood slips from the tip and evaporates before it reaches his robe. He smiles up at me and coughs blood and whispers something in a gentle way, a plume of vapor bursts from every orifice of the robe, and I fall back covering my face. When I turn back, the robe is filled with sand. I stand, hands shaking, and drop the knife and walk. After a minute, I look back and see nothing. The robe, the staff, the knife: all swallowed by the immutable desert.