Desert of Sharp Sorrows
by Michael Kelly and Jonathan William HodgesThere was Myra and there was the sun, descending.
The sun hung low on the horizon, a blood orange crushed, its pulp smearing the sky, leaving a yellow and purple band of light the color of her hidden welts. Her hidden shame.
When the last light leaked from the sky, the cold came and gripped her like a vise. Like Ian’s vindictive hands.
Myra hadn’t realized the desert would get so cold. She shivered, folded her arms, winced when her hand touched tender biceps. She probed the carefully concealed parts of her body, touching all the places Ian had handled. The pain registered from places much deeper than mere nerves.
No, she hadn’t realized a lot of things.
Myra stood in a dirt rut before her cooling, ticking Toyota with its weak, wan headlights - sickly eyes spearing the gathering twilight. The wind whispered, then cut at her face: a rough lover. Ancient orange dust swirled across the plain, scratched her eyes. She trembled. It was so cold. But she was here, in the desert. Myra had always wanted to see the desert. Wanted to walk, alone, across the open expanse underneath a limitless sky. She thought, once, she might be able to walk here forever.
She’d never weighed the significance of forever.
Rocks and shrubs dotted the desert basin, a few small cacti; she thought it would be barren, a reflection of the cold landscape of her heart. In the dying light she could make out a crooked mesquite tree, a hearth for shadows.
She turned, left imprints in the landscape that would soon be lost, forgotten. She trudged to the car, slid into the seat, keyed the engine. The headlights winked, dimmed, then flared brightly, spotlighting the tree. A tinny song squawked from the A.M. radio. ...still...haven’t found...what I’m looking for.
No, Myra thought, I haven’t. She grimaced. She remembered the sun-glassed singer, the hit song. She owned the vinyl album: The Joshua Tree. Bought it in a used record store. She wished it were here with her now if only to look at the cover art. A reference point. Perhaps she could find a Joshua tree. The Joshua tree.
She remembered Ian, when he’d seen the picture on the back of the album, snorting derisively, claiming it blasphemous to use that image, to listen to that music, because the tree was named after the prophet Joshua from the Old Testament. How the tree mimicked Joshua’s upraised arms as he beckoned his people to the promised land.
Myra grimaced. Promised land. She once thought the desert might be her own promised land. Now it was cold and without boundary, like space, like the ocean, like the places people went to become lost.
The song petered out and she turned off the radio. She steered the car down the pitted rut for several hundred yards before pulling off and parking under a mesquite tree. Night fell like a dark and heavy blanket, suffocating. Angry, sharp stars glittered in the night sky, cold, hard-edged. Outside the tiny car, the wind sang. And its song was high and keening, full of pain and torment and sorrow.
Myra reached around, yanked a sweater from a plastic bag on the back seat. She hunched down into her seat, snuggled under the sweater, and stared up at the star-studded sky. Her stomach rumbled, complained, and she glanced back at her few belongings packed into plastic grocery bags. No telling how long she’d need the food to last, so she ignored her body’s pining. Her last meal had been in Lake Havasu. But she couldn’t remember now if that had been earlier today or yesterday. She did remember the man beside her at the diner counter, though.
His eyes had been bright and angry like the desert stars. Skin like worn leather. His mouth gaunt and hungry, cheekbones wide and angular. A face of sharp sorrows.
Strange, she’d thought, the way a man could wear his life like that. The way a man, a woman, could become a portrait of that which they wished to hide the most. Her bruises showed the same as his anguish.
She’d had the feeling she’d seen this man elsewhere, that this wasn’t their first encounter. He was a familiar stranger. She realized now it was his heart she knew. His pain.
He’d sat in silence while she browsed the menu. She had ordered coffee and a turkey sandwich. She’d blown on her coffee more than she drank it, watching the steam rise, hoping for it to spell out the way, to map uncharted territory, to, for once, make things clear. He had not read a paper, not talked to the waitress or other patrons. He simply sat and stared at his plate, the bread crumbs and smear of grape jelly like a stain of crusty blood. When the waitress had periodically cleared the counter of emptied plates, she’d always left his behind. Empty. Blank. Not like his expression.
He did not raise his head when he spoke to her the first time, as she’d picked up the second half of her sandwich. And that faint feeling of familiarity washed through her, his words spoken with a sense of knowledge and intimacy. As if they were secret lovers.
"There’s not a thing in this life that don’t happen for a reason," he’d told her. His accent had been unusual, and she’d found herself simultaneously enchanted and threatened.
"The good, the bad. Any of it. It’s all got a purpose."
She’d offered him a polite smile, took a bite of her sandwich, and turned her head to look out the far window, away from him, as if he might vanish if ignored, as if ghosts didn‘t exist so long as no one believed in them.
"This ain’t any different."
She’d laid down her sandwich, sipped at her coffee, bitter on her tongue.
"The way I see it, we’re both here at this diner for a reason. Either I be needing you, or you be needing me."
Needing you. The words were still foreign to her.
The man had reached into a pocket and pushed something along the counter, left it beside her cooling porcelain mug. "Here," he’d said, and raised his tanned hand to reveal a small, black leather pouch. "Take it."
She’d spoken to him for the first time. "What is it?"
"It’ll help you find your way."
Myra had felt his stare. She’d glanced up, saw his bright, angry eyes; his hungry mouth. Younger than she first realized, hardly older than herself, he’d seemed to possess a wisdom she couldn’t recognize. She'd wondered what it would feel like to kiss that hungry mouth. To once again feel greedy, passionate lips. And whether she could drink his knowledge like ambrosia from off his tongue. Instead, she’d turned away. "No thank you."
"Please," he’d said. "I’ve no use for it any longer."
She’d glanced again to the pouch, touched it. The fabric was soft but stiff. Like a small carcass. It emanated enchantment, as if magic lay within. Honest magic. If only she’d ever believed in such a thing. She’d taken the pouch from the countertop, stuffed it in the pocket of her loose-fitting jeans, took a deliberate sip of her cold coffee to settle her nerves, to quell this nervous energy.
"Happy?" she’d asked, heart pounding, embroiled now with a lurking edginess. She'd turned to find the space beside her empty but for a stark white plate stained with a blob of grape jelly. And long after he’d left she found herself wondering about his terse and hungry mouth, his sharp desert eyes.
Myra shook the memory from her head. Under the cool, bejeweled desert sky, with the strange man’s voice ringing in her head and an unfamiliar contentment smoldering in her heart, Myra fell asleep.
She dreamed beneath a desert sky.
Myra woke cold and alone.
She blinked the sleep from her eyes, sat up from the modest recline of her front seat. Shivered. Christ, she thought, her arms coming up to cross and slip beneath her armpits, who’d have thought the desert would be so cold? She glanced at the rearview mirror, stared at her impassive face. The black beret she sported sat askew on her head and she lifted it, stared at the few clumps of wispy hair still clinging to her skull like strange sea anemones. She placed the beret back atop her head. She didn’t care what she looked like. Not really. Not anymore. The small hat was protection from the scorching desert sun. At least that’s what she told herself. She hoped she wasn’t so vain, so shallow. Not at this point. There were more important things upon which to dwell.
A sharp pain stabbed her gut.
Myra tossed off the sweater and stepped from the Toyota. She walked around the mesquite tree, pulled down her pants, squatted and pissed. The stream of urine left a warm, steaming puddle. Seeing nothing with which to wipe herself, Myra straightened and pulled up her pants.
She turned, squinted into the horizon. The desert was still and cold and beautiful. A stark scene of serenity.
How many lives, she wondered, quelled beneath this sand?
Briefly Myra saw movement down in the basin, a shadowy form separating from a tree. She blinked. There was a man down there, standing stock still, staring her way. She thought of hulking Ian, stalking her. Yet deep in her heart, in that place that still held feelings and intuition, she knew it was him, the man from the diner.
Either I be needing you, or you be needing me.
But Myra didn’t need anyone.
Myra didn’t need anything.
She slid a hand under her shirt, touched the stark, bare spot near her heart where her breast had once been. She rubbed the bumpy landscape. Barren, like the desert. She didn’t need the breast. She’d never had kids, and even if she had Myra didn’t believe she’d have breast-fed. Her hand probed the rough-hewn skin. Another missing piece of her life. No, Myra didn’t need anything.
Myra dug into her pockets, searching for her keys, and felt something foreign. She pulled out the small black pouch of worn leather. She’d forgotten about it, purposefully not inspected it the night before. She felt silly for taking it at all, mildly wary.
The leather was warm to the touch, and there was something hard inside, like a block of stone. Or, she thought grimly, a lump of metastasized flesh. She unzipped the pouch, pulled out a small, heart-shaped, silver box. The box had a small hasp, which she unclasped. She opened the hard silver heart. It was a compass with a bright yellow day-glo needle. Instead of the familiar compass points – N, S, W, and E - it bore words, a strange cursive script that wrapped around the compass dial: Life, Love, Sorrow, and Death. The needle hovered halfway between Sorrow and Death, edging down, ever down.
She grimaced, remembered the man’s words. It’ll help you find your way. Myra snapped the compass shut, placed it in the pouch, and returned it to her pocket. Another cruel joke. She fished her keys from her other pocket and returned to the car.
Myra didn’t suspect she needed any help finding death. She’d hovered within its proximity her entire life.
She maneuvered the car along the pitted ground, down into the vast basin, until the track stopped and the ground became too rocky to traverse. She braked, turned off the engine, stepped from the car, and listened to the cooling engine tick down like a dying mechanical heart.
She lifted a hand above her eyes and squinted into the bright horizon. It was warming considerably, the taste of salt forming on her upper lip. In the distance, shimmering heat waves rippled, distorting the landscape, ghosts rising up. She thought she glimpsed a vague shape of a man, that man, the stranger from the diner, moving slowly across the rust-colored terrain.
Myra lifted her arm, waved. "Hey," she shouted. "Hello." Her voice was muffled, ineffectual, suffocated and lost in the vast desert. The figure stopped moving, and Myra couldn’t be sure in the wavering heat if it really was a man after all. Perhaps it was a Joshua tree, she thought. She tried once again, cupping her hands at either side of her dry mouth.
"Hello!"
No answer. Of course not. No one ever had any answers for Myra. Not her doctors. Not her former friends. Not Ian. Especially not Ian. No answers. Only questions.
Her fingers brushed the soft welts on her upper arms that she wished weren’t still there. She wished the pain would vanish as easily as the home, the friends, the man she‘d left behind. Her hand flitted, birdlike, near the loose fabric of her blouse, lingering over the dead space, wishing there was something underneath.
She reached into the back seat and grabbed the plastic bag with her possessions. Turned and started to walk across the desert floor, toward the distant figure she wasn‘t sure was a figure at all.
Couldn’t be sure of anything at all. The one constant in her life. Nothing stayed the same for long.
Myra moved deliberately across the sand. Her sneakers trod on small, sharp stones that jabbed through the rubber soles and pricked her feet.
The morning grew hot, stifling; the desert ground gave off heat like a cooking griddle. Myra continued her journey, picking her way past rocks and shrubs. She reached into the bag, retrieved a bottle of water, and gulped it quickly down. The tepid water did little to slake the thirst building in her. There was a strange hunger as well. A hunger that craved more than only food.
As she moved across the desert basin she could still see the figure of the man in the distance. He wasn’t any closer, but he didn’t seem any further away either. Instead, as Myra walked, the distance remained the same, as if this were some strange carnival ride; the prize was always out of reach.
She remembered when she’d first found the lump. Myra wasn’t one to normally perform self-examinations. But she’d woken that day and known something was amiss. She had sensed it - a strange quality to the air, to her surroundings, to her mood. Overnight the world seemed to change to a dreamy landscape wherein nothing was as it had been.
So, as she’d stepped from the shower, Myra moved to her dresser and sat naked before the mirror. Staring at her bland face, she wondered when a smile had last crossed her features. She forced one then, a strained smile, and her face twisted in a grim rictus. She’d sat hunched over, as if there was a heaviness on her shoulders, on her life. So she wasn’t really surprised to find another heaviness, a hard mass, on the underside of her left breast. Myra, sitting naked and alone in her bedroom, had sighed and made a doctor’s appointment.
One in every eight women in North America will develop breast cancer, Myra was told. One in eight. Bad odds.
Trapped in her house, Myra had taken to walking. She’d wake, and once Ian left for the day, would venture out the front door, pick a direction, and go. She soon discovered there was a world outside her door, outside her dirt-streaked windows. North, south, east, west. Love, life, sorrow, death. It didn’t matter. She walked, slow and steady, taking in the sights, smells, and sounds of the city, of her neighborhood. In all her years in this part of town, she’d never really explored the area, never really seen it. People gardened, washed cars, played softball. They sat on porches and read, smoked cigarettes, sipped beers. Children played hopscotch and skipped double-dutch.
People were outside, living. It took Myra dying to discover that.
Then one day, in a dark part of the city that she’d never, in her earlier years, venture to, she saw a poster in the window of a used record store and it stopped her dead in her tracks. U2: The Joshua Tree. Four young men standing in a barren desert, and behind them stood dark hills like angry, raised welts. Myra had stared at the poster, past the innocuous band members to the desert, to the hills rendered in black and white and shades of gray. A chiaroscuro. She walked into the store, found the album in a corner bin. She flipped the cover over, and there, on the back, was the tree, off to the right, solitary. The band members stood to the left, two in the distance, two in the foreground, the lead singer’s head cropped out of the photo as if he weren’t important. And he wasn’t.
The tree was.
The lone tree struck a chord deep in Myra. It was crooked, bent, like a lot of people. It was also strong and proud. Two large branches spread out on either side, like open arms. Welcoming. She decided, then and there, she would go to the desert. She would go to the tree.
At the counter, paying for the album, the man at the register asked, "Do you have what you need?" And Myra had looked up, she now realized, into a face of sharp sorrows.
So here she was, in the desert, clutching a plastic grocery bag, wearing a black beret, staring at a distant image of a man or tree. Glad if it were either the tree or the man.
Another stride along the desert floor, then another. One foot after the other, toward...well, she didn’t rightly know. It was enough that she was moving, never mind the goal. She was looking for something. Isn’t everyone, she thought. For the first time in her life she was moving forward.
Myra walked. The sun followed her, moved across the sky, a beacon. The heat scorched her like a worm trapped on a sidewalk after a summer storm and left to bake on the hard concrete. The far figure stood impassive, a sentinel on the horizon. Her feet carried her over the stony earth, past small flowering shrubs and spiky plants of cacti. Little brown lizards darted in front of her, full of life. The desert wind sang low. And the figure, the man in the distance - for Myra was certain it was him - inched ever closer. Briefly, Myra had the impression of a large wooden cross, but it vanished, like dreams do, and she saw him, waiting with arms wide open. She smiled, hurried forward, stumbling over the rocky terrain. She marched across the sharp desert floor, plastic bag in one hand, the other hand holding the beret fast to her head. Orange sand blew in her face, stung her dry eyes. She blinked.
He was closer.
The sun set, leaving a red twilight the color of thin blood. Night eased slowly across the vast sky. But Myra still saw him. He was a dim silhouette, within shouting distance.
Myra called out "I have everything I need." She fished the small leather pouch from her pocket, opened it. Pulled out the silver heart-shaped box. She imagined the box pulsed, as if alive, like a real heart. She didn’t need to open the compass to know where the needle pointed. Her life, it seemed, always wavered somewhere between sorrow and death.
As she drew nearer, night fell fast. Stars twinkled brightly, hotly, as if they held an incandescent rage. He fell, too, crumpling, folding in, laying down on the hard, barren ground.
Myra ran, her beret flying off, carried on the night wind. She reached him, breathless, and knelt at his side as the ground poked her legs. But it wasn’t him. It was a tree. A Joshua tree. Myra wasn’t surprised. And the tree, like Myra, was tired. So very tired. It didn’t need anything anymore.
Holding tight to her heart-shaped box, Myra lay down in his arms. She imagined his hungry mouth. She turned, stared up at the angry stars.
She dreamed beneath a desert sky.
©Michael Kelly and Jonathan William Hodges
Michael Kelly has had previous work published in Reflection's Edge, "Sea of Ash and Sorrow." This is another of his linked "Sorrow" stories. Other work has appeared in several magazines, journals, and anthologies, including The Carleton Arts Review, The Literary Journal, Plum Ruby Review, and Creatio ex Nihilo. His first collection, Scratching the Surface, is now out, and a novel, Ouroboros (co-written with Carol Weekes) is due out in 2008. Currently, he is an editor at City Slab Magazine.Jonathan William Hodges resides in the North Carolina foothills, where he works in an independent record shop. His written work has appeared previously in Space & Time, Flesh & Blood, and others.