Desert Lights
by Alex Aro
It’s so damn hot out that one day my skin melts right off. I can’t even move I’m so overheated; all I can do is watch as my body is reduced to nothing but a skeleton. At first I’m annoyed and I’m thinking how the hell am I going to put my skin back on? It’s going to look funny if I glue it back in place and the temperature is so intense anyway that any glue lying around is probably congealed and no good.
I shift slightly on the couch and I can see the pile of my skin start to crawl across the floor. The arms are reaching out, the fingers digging into the carpet, flat and organ-less. My eyes are off the television and it takes my skin half an hour before it reaches my front door. I’m expecting the rumpled two dimensional arms to reach up and turn the knob but instead my skin leaks under the crack of the door and after a minute it’s gone. I get up and look out the window but there’s a humid haze casting dizzy rays all over and it’s hard to distinguish anything else except sand. Right now my skin is dragging itself along some gritty trail and I wave out the window and hope it knows where it’s going.
Later on my mom comes walking in the door with a bag of groceries. I follow her into the kitchen and she dumps the bag onto the table. There’s sand everywhere, in the loaf of bread and between the slices of cheese she bought. I’m so hungry but my teeth are tired of sand getting stuck between them and my taste buds are dying to know what a real sandwich tastes like. I slam my fist into the table but my mother doesn’t seem to notice. She hasn’t even said anything about my skeletal appearance.
Why did we move here again? I ask.
For a few minutes she says nothing. She pulls her head out from the fridge and says, I told you. It’s cheaper here, we couldn’t afford the other place anymore.
Doesn’t the heat bother you?
Not anymore, she shrugs. I’ve just learned how to use as little energy as I can. Besides, what are you complaining about? That new look you have looks like it keeps you nice and cool.
I shake my head and go back to the couch. On the television there’s a man swimming in a pool and I try to remember what that’s like. I try to picture water surrounding me, moisture and saturation massaging my body as I torpedo through the pool. I can’t close my eyes because my eyelids are somewhere far off in the desert so I cover my eye sockets with my hand and for a brief moment I am swimming, my arms are tearing through the water, my legs kicking and ahead I see nothing but beautiful blue. I smile and make the motions in the air, pawing at nothing. When I open my eyes the serenity disappears, gone like my skin under the doorway. Perhaps my skin is heading to some distant pool where the water is always the same temperature and girls swim in the nude—a place where one’s skin chooses to remain on its body.
***
A couple hours later Bingo walks through my front door. He’s my only friend here and I think I like him so much because he’s the only person not affected by the heat. Or rather, he’s way too dumb to even realize how hot it is and in some odd way being next to him makes me feel a little less resentful about it.
He walks in and stops immediately at the front of the room, staring at me quizzically. You uh, change something? he says.
I nod.
You lost your skin? he asks, sounding unsure of his question.
Bingo! I yell.
What?
Never mind.
You hurt?
No man. You know, in a place like this you don’t feel any pain. It’s just too fucking hot to even know what pain is. I’d take standing in the snow and knowing how much this really hurts instead of this heat any day.
Snow? he asks.
I shake my head. Think of really cold rain, I say.
Rain?
I forget that he’s lived here his whole life. I don’t even try to explain the concept of rain.
He’s about to sit down and I wave my hand and say no, no, no. We’re going outside, I can’t stay in this house anymore.
He shrugs and walks back to the door and I follow, open and close and we’re out on my front porch staring off across the endless dunes. The sun is way too bright and I have to shield my eyes just to see the steps leading off my porch and when I squint just enough I can make out patches of blue sky etched between the overbearing luminosity. Everything here is pale and tan, gritty and soft. All the houses look the same, dome desert igloos, rows and rows of copycat designs and even if there were differences between them the overabundant sand covers them up.
At night when I lay in bed I picture the same scenario in my head. It goes like this: When I fall asleep a vacuum salesman is walking towards our sleepy desert village in hopes of catching us when we wake and selling us a grand vacuum. At the same time, in conjunction with the closing of my eyes and the start of the vacuum salesman’s journey, an artist is also strolling towards our little blue bruise, he finds the desert night so inspiring. The salesman is walking too slowly, he can see the sun starting to reach up over the distant dunes and he begins running. The artist is running too, paint brush in one hand and canvas in the other as he uses his shirt as a palette, dipping into blue and white, black and yellow, dashing along in his attempt to capture as much of the scene as he can. The salesman and the artist are coming from different directions, the salesman from the west where there are vast ideas about how a vacuum should perform and the artist from the east where he lives among the trees and has seen the world thanks to his artistic talent. Despite his travels, the artist has never seen a desert like this before; the desolate atmosphere renders something within him, a need to paint this desolation for the world to feel. And the salesman has never been this far from his home in the west and he’s smiling so hugely at the thought of money that he doesn’t feel his back buckling under the weight of the vacuums he carries. There’s a point where the road from the west and the road from the east meet and it is here at this intersection that the salesman and the artist bump into one another. The impact sends both men flying backwards into the air and the salesman’s biggest model bursts out of the package and turns on (because one of the vast western ideas was to have a vacuum cleaner that no longer required electrical outlets). The artist’s paints and supplies go this way and that and the vacuum, with its immense amount of power, begins sucking up all the sand in sight. The vacuum sucks up all the paints and supplies too and the artist gets mad and immediately starts yelling at the salesman for not only ruining his means of creativity but for sucking away the scene in which he was painting as well. The salesman apologizes and hits the reverse switch on the vacuum but there’s too much sand and rocks and because the western ideas never considered a situation like this, the whole thing clogs. Inside the paints slide between the cracks of the sand and rocks and from the vacuum comes an explosion of color. The artist is in awe as he sees his colors spilling out of the vacuum and recreating the desert into something new, something glorious. The colors are so vibrant, teeming with more life than they have ever witnessed thus far in their lives. The salesman has an immediate change of mind and realizes he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life selling these contraptions. The artist pats the salesman on the back and says, do you see what we are creating? Do you understand this beauty? And it is here in the dream when I wake up and look out the window to see the sand replaced by rainbow hills and swirling roads. I see the salesman and the artist pushing the vacuum along, redecorating the world with splashes of paint. The vacuum spits puddles of blue into my front yard and a pool appears and when they reach the end of my street the clog comes undone and blasts all the sand and rocks far, far away. The sun follows the trail of sand to wherever it lands and while I’m waving goodbye to the miserable heat, I’m always waving hello and thank you to the salesman and the artist. Then I wake up.
Bingo and I aren‘t walking anywhere in particular. It’s not a good idea to walk too far in this village. I’ve already heard about five stories of people wandering out, whether out of sheer boredom or a purposeful journey, only to never come back. There’s a cemetery on the edge of the village that we jokingly call the ‘Thirsty Graveyard’. When we get dust storms all the grave stones get buried and once everything settles the undertaker has to go dig them out. It’s the right thing to do.
She’s lookin’, Bingo says.
She is?
Yeah.
I duck a little behind Bingo and look at her. She’s standing in front of the general store, tilting back and forth on her bare feet in rhythm with the warm breezes whipping by. She’s wearing only overalls and I can see the side of her breast and though it excites me I also feel guilty for staring. We pass by and she smiles and waves and we wave back. We do this often, Bingo and I on our pointless and energy wasting walks and we see this girl, always at the general store, and she smiles and waves and we do the same, like it’s our little routine or something. I want to have the courage to stop and actually open my mouth; I’d like to just know her name even. But we have passed her and again, like always, it is too late. For now she will remain the girl at the general store.
I like to think that those waves and that smile are displayed especially for me. But yesterday I was myself, I had skin and hair, I was the color of the sand. Today I’m all bones, burning white through the hazy street, and she still smiled and waved and so I wonder if it’s just in her nature to do so. She could give everyone that passes that same smile, that same wave and that thought makes me no longer want to take walks.
Bingo thinks nothing of the situation. He never asks me why I don’t talk to her; he doesn’t pressure me or call me out on my fears like a normal friend would. The thought simply doesn’t occur to him. Sometimes I wish it would though. I wish he would pester me and call me a coward and a pussy. Maybe that would drive me to walk up the general store steps and say hello.
We’re way past the general store, walking along and making dull conversation when Bingo’s arm goes up in flames. Just like that, engulfed in flickering orange and yellow tongues. For the first few seconds he doesn’t even notice, I have to point it out to him. And even then, the air filling with the sickening smell of burning flesh, he just shrugs and bends down to wipe his arm across a patch of sand. There are times when I admire his naïve nonchalant attitude and then there are times when I don’t and this is one of them.
The fire is hot and his arm is like a bad barbecue and he walks over to me like nothing happened. Actually he’s laughing.
How is that funny? I ask.
He shrugs again and sometimes I swear he could shrug for the rest of his life, never speak another word. We turn around and walk back home in silence and I can’t take my eyes off his arm. The skin is black and bloated and in some places pieces are barely hanging on. We must look so ridiculous walking down the street, a skeleton and an idiot with a charred arm.
***
Bingo eats dinner at my house that night like he does most nights. My mom calls him son number two and when he responds to her he always says yeah ma? Night settles in slowly, as if it can’t quite find comfort across the barren landscape. We are at the kitchen table, my mom is upstairs sleeping and we are sipping mugs of water, listening to the dark desert.
Rattlesnake night, Bingo says.
I sit up straighter, elbows halfway across the table and listen closer. Then I can hear the maraca sounds echoing across the hills and dunes, a reptilian band of deadly rain sticks.
You’re right.
Around here it’s either a rattlesnake night or a coyote night. It’s never both. If the sun goes down and for a long time you hear silence it’s most likely a rattlesnake night. Sometimes the rattlesnakes will shake their tails timidly to trick you but don’t be fooled. You must widen your ears the way disbelief widens the eyes. If it’s a coyote night you’ll know right away. Their howls will haunt the night air and it’s always on coyote nights that I get the least amount of sleep. The coyote nights are always slightly cooler, those seldom occurrences when an arctic wind will somehow find its way here and tickle across the sand. But tonight the temperature doesn’t change and the rattlesnakes love the heat and we can hear their tails singing blindly in the blackness outside.
I can’t stand the monotony of the house any longer, the slow tick of the clock on the wall, the hum of the refrigerator, Bingo’s eyes moving around to stare at every appliance, every little corner of the kitchen. Let’s go outside, I say. Let’s go bother some rattlesnakes or something. I’d like to see one of them bite through bone. I laugh at that and I can’t remember the last time I’d laughed at anything. The heat seems to make everything so serious.
Bingo gets up and follows me out the front door. I close it quietly so as not to wake my mom. When I turn from closing the door I see Bingo yards in front of me, his head tilted back staring off at something in the sky. I don’t know what he could possibly be staring at; we’ve seen the stars thousands of times. After a while the beauty of it fades and now when I look up at night I think of sparkling acne on a dark skinned face.
As I descend down the steps of my front porch I then see what Bingo is staring at. There are bright lights in the sky, bigger and fiercer than stars, diamond-shaped fires hovering seamlessly. My head is cocked back and I join Bingo and we say nothing. I’ve never seen anything like this and more of them appear in the sky. First there are two, then three, a minute later four and then five. I forget about the stars and the acne, I forget about the god damn heat and the fact that I’ve lost my skin maybe forever and in that moment I’m lost in the brilliant diamonds, floating as freely as they are.
Desert lights, Bingo says finally.
I don’t even hear him at first and he says it again. I look over at him and it’s the most intelligent thing he’s ever said.
Yeah, I say, desert lights.
I wonder if we are witnessing God or even something better than God. God’s God. Bingo and I, two small dots on a bump of desert, sweating and in awe under the blazing diamond eyes strewn about the sky. We remain in that position; heads tilted back and locked, eyes unblinking, until the sun reaches over the horizon and the approaching daylight blows out the floating flames.
The lights return the next night, another rattlesnake night, and there are more of them, some hanging higher than others and it’s like this grand connect the dots and I trace the lines with my finger but no matter how many times I do the resulting shape is one I don’t recognize. It means nothing to me or at least when I do see it, my fingers moving across from dot to dot, desert light to desert light, meaning escapes me. Maybe Bingo understands the shape but when I ask him he looks at me like I’m hydra-headed.
Others notice the lights by now too. I see people hobbling out of their houses, struggling against the heat to take a gander at the bright mystery floating above us. Everyone’s eyes as wide as ours, their arms slack at their sides. We are all bodies in awe, absorbing the enigma, trying to make sense of it while appreciating the beauty at the same time. At least it takes my mind off the heat for the time being and that alone is enough of a celebration for me.
Bingo pokes me and I turn to him. He points at the sand dune next to ours and, sitting aloft and alone, is the girl from the general store. She sits with her legs together and straight out in front of her. She keeps one arm by her side and the other is raised, her hand flat and above her eyebrows, shielding. I look to the lights and then to her and her face is entranced. She looks like she gets it, like she understands every little crazy thing in this universe. That’s how I want to look, the appearance of understanding would be enough, whether I truly got it or not.
Go talk to her, Bingo says.
I shrug.
But here, out in the open desert, under the lambent eyes in the sky and away from the general store she appears more approachable. The more I stare at her I can feel my bones harden with confidence, skeletal swagger.
Bingo says it again, go talk to her. And in that instant I get up and walk over to the spot where she is sitting, so calm and complacent, her face illuminated and all the more enchanting. She doesn’t even notice me at first. I’m standing there, wondering what to say. The task is far more daunting when I’m inches from her than when I was back next to Bingo. I’m shaking in the skin I no longer have.
Stirred by my rattling bones she turns and smiles at me. I know you, she says. You walk by the general store all the time.
Yeah, I say. Yeah, that’s me.
At this distance her attractiveness magnifies. There are qualities to her features that I would never notice by continually passing the general store. Her nose is a perfect slant of skin and I see now, in rhyme with her smile, her nostrils flair slightly and it’s playground cute, swings and slides romance. Dimples cut up into her cheeks and her eyes are wide and deep, eyes you want to crawl up into, curl yourself into their warmth. She pats the sand and tells me to join her.
The lights are so beautiful, she says.
They certainly are, I reply. I’m sliding my hand closer to hers, thinking how she would react if I touched her. I’d love to grab her and turn her head, slow and romantic like the suave movie actors do, and under the burning desert lights we would ignite our own passionate fire. Her heart pushing through her skin in fast pumps, her lips to my whatever is left, her tongue darting inside and licking bone. What’s your name? I ask.
Jewel, she says. My daddy likes to call me the Jewel of the Desert. She smirks at this and I can tell there is a deep connection to the name that roots into her past, as though whenever she tells someone this small bit of information her head floods with a thousand images and moments relating to the nickname.
She tells me more about her past and I learn that her father, or daddy as she calls him, owns the general store. They live above it in a small apartment and she helps out by bagging groceries and sweeping the sand off the front steps. She says there aren’t many people around here her age and she always looks forward to seeing Bingo and I walk by. It’s reassuring to hear that and I flash an X-ray smile, teeth exposed. She asks about me and my past and I tell her that I moved here not too long ago and I’m not very fond of the heat and she agrees with me. She’s lived here her whole life, seventeen hotter-than-fucking-hell years, and she still hasn’t adapted.
Where I’m from, I tell her, there are pools and palm trees. There are beaches and parks and people everywhere you look. There are grand buildings that reach up toward the sky and hills upon hills of lush green valleys. Everything that is missing here is over there.
She’s looking at me in awe, her jaw loose and I can tell she’s trying to picture all these things in her ever-turning head. But unlike the reminiscent overflow that accompanies her nickname, she looks at a loss to fully comprehend what I’ve told her. She’s never seen pools or palm trees, she can’t understand how tall the buildings are because here all she has are dome houses and sand stretching to the horizon. I want to take her right now, rip her off the dune and usher her off to the place I once called home. I want to kiss her under the solitude of a palm tree, peel off her clothes in a swimming pool. I want this dune we’re lying on to transform into the tallest skyscraper during a city-wide blackout and the desert lights (or city lights in this case) would shine only for us.
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We stand up to leave and I look over at the dune where Bingo and I sat moments before but he is gone. I look around to see if he is somewhere else but all I see are shadowy strangers. She tugs at my fingers and pulls me along and our route to the general store is mapped out in the sand with each step we take.
***
We’re up on the roof of the general store and it’s just like I imagined and the lights seem slightly brighter with the height adjustment. We share minutes of silence before she asks me what the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen is.
I want to say that it’s her but I don’t want to come off as cheap and that would probably turn her off. I tell her I need to think about it for a second and I’m racking my brain, I’m stroking my bony chin trying to remember one single moment, one single object that outshines any other. Then I remember something that I haven’t thought of in quite some time.
Back when I lived in my old home, I tell her, the place with the palm trees and pools, I was walking down the street in the city and it was crowded as always. It’s not like here where everything is wide open and you could walk forever without seeing a soul. I sort of miss what it feels like to have someone bump into your shoulder, to have the mistaken touch of a stranger. But anyway, this one particular day as I’m walking along I see something under one of the sidewalk palm trees up ahead. As I got closer I could see it was a painting but there wasn’t anyone nearby. I asked a few people if it was theirs and they said no. The painting wasn’t of anything in particular, just a mash of swirling colors, vibrant reds and yellows splashed across in spiraling patterns. I stood there for a long time mesmerized by it, trying to find something definite within the slithering colors, to find my own meaning in it. All the while hundreds of people passed by me, some brushed up against my sides, others told me to get out of their way. I couldn’t believe no one seemed to notice this painting, no one else stopped to stand beside me and lose themselves in these mysterious strokes. I finally left and when I returned the next day the painting was gone, but I heard stories of other paintings left all over the city. That idea though, that some anonymous artist would leave paintings in various spots throughout the city for people like me to stumble upon and admire and have us feel as though they were painted specifically for us, that idea is the most beautiful thought and that painting the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. And what about you?
Well, she says, I don’t know if it counts or not.
Why is that?
On my twelfth birthday my daddy and I were out riding on camels because that’s what we do every year on my birthday. We were riding along when all of a sudden I saw a mountain made of ice way out in the distance. I thought that was my birthday present and I started screaming like little girls do when they’re excited, saying oh thank you so much daddy! I couldn’t believe my daddy had built a mountain out of ice just for me! I stopped the camel and stared at it for minutes. Finally my father, who had been behind me, caught up and told me no, there was no ice mountain. I was seeing a mirage. But it was there, and whether it was real or not, that ice mountain is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, still to this day.
Maybe someday we’ll see a real ice mountain. They’re out there; you just have to actually leave the desert to see them.
She nods and I can see her eyes opening and closing, she looks very tired. I reach my hand over and caress her cheek and her eyes shut and stay that way. I cover my eyes with my hands and listen to the rattlesnake orchestra in the distance as I drift off. That night I dream once again of the unlikely meeting between the vacuum salesman and the artist, only this time I jump out my window as they pass, I do three flips in the air and they applaud when I land and I join them as we paint the desert like it’s a fresh canvas.
In the morning when I finally wake up and the only light in the sky is the overbearing sun, I see that she is awake and sitting upright. She looks over at me as I stir out of sleepiness, adjusting my eyes to the blazing sunlight streaming on my face. There is a faint breeze that whisks by and she keeps her gaze focused on me as her hair sways in all directions, reaching across and under her nostrils and tickling the air around her. For a couple of seconds I contemplate changing the painting as the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen to this—her face with windy hair.
Good morning, she greets.
Yeah, I say rubbing my eye sockets to erase the early morning fatigue, good morning to you too.
There’s something I want to show you.
Where?
Come on, she says. She grabs my hand and helps me up to my feet. Here up on the roof, burning with the heat of sun, I feel like the king of the desert and she my queen.
She pulls me over to the other side of the roof that faces the back of the store. It’s nice having her lure me like this, it’s nice to feel her skin and know she isn’t afraid to touch my bones. Each new moment is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, her and I on the roof, then her hand grabbing mine and now us looking down at the backyard of the store and she tugs me along. Right now we are careless children in bodies too big, running across a barren wonderland where we fill in the blanks with our imaginations.
She lets go of my hand and hops down off the roof and I follow. Then she is running and waving for me to keep up with her. I stay a bit behind and admire her as her legs pump up and down, propelling her faster and faster across the sand. I watch her hair flitter about wildly, her arms out wide and wobbly. Then she stops and I catch up to her.
Here, she says. She points down and I see a single flower and the petals are the same shade of red as the swirls in that painting left under that palm tree just for me. I planted this when I was a very young girl, only three or four. It’s about as far back as I can remember. Everything else just blurs together, but this stands out vividly. I can see myself digging the hole and planting the seed. I came out every day and watched as the flower grew. My daddy told me the roots go on for miles and miles and connect with some far away lake and that’s how it has lived this long. It’s still so alive. I hope I’m as vibrant when I get old.
How long do these types of flowers usually last?
I’m not sure, my daddy never told me. I thought it would have withered by now but look at it!
It sure is a pretty looking flower.
It’s the only one like it in the whole village, she says gleaming with pride. I picture the roots traveling beneath us, outstretched like botanical telephone wires, connecting hundreds of miles away to the fabled ice mountain she wishes her father built for her long ago.
We should leave tonight, she says.
And go where?
Let’s follow the lights.
Follow the lights?
Yes. Let’s follow them and see where they take us. Let’s leave the desert and see something new.
Alright, yeah. Let’s do it.
She leans in and kisses me on the cheek and then laughs playfully.
***
I run home to write a note to my mom and to say goodbye to Bingo. I scribble something quick on a piece of paper and stick it on the fridge with a magnet. Bingo is sitting outside on his porch by himself staring off at nothing. I tell him that I’m leaving and he doesn’t seem to understand.
Leaving?
Yes. I might never come back.
Going where?
We’re following the lights.
Desert lights.
Yes, desert lights. We’re going far, far away.
He scratches his head. He can’t imagine anything else besides desert; the whole world is a desert in his eyes. The edge of the horizon is the end of the world and I’m about to walk right off it.
Goodbye, I say. It was nice knowing you.
Okay, see you tomorrow.
Back at the general store the girl fills a backpack with goods for our journey. Daddy doesn’t know, she says. I peek inside and see bundles of sticks, bottles of water and pouches of food, a sleeping bag. We wait until night settles and the lights appear in the sky as they have the past few nights.
As we begin our journey we pass the desert people emerging from their homes to witness the lights again. There are tents set up and people vend food and drinks. Families gather in chairs, they point and stare. It is now a ritualistic festival, a new source of entertainment for the desert folk. As we leave them behind they will continue to come out until the lights stop burning. They will talk about this event for years and years and try to explain it to relatives who can’t imagine it.
***
The first night we walk for miles and it seems like we’ve gone nowhere. The lights aren’t any closer or brighter and sand still stretches out in all directions. We stop when our legs can’t take anymore and set up camp for the night. She pulls out the sleeping bag and I realize we will be sharing it; our bodies will be touching as we sleep and that thought is comforting. It is still too hot for a fire. We climb into the sleeping bag and her body slips into mine like a puzzle, we fit nicely.
She kisses me again and I kiss her back, her lips cover my mouth, her tongue counts my teeth. She rubs my hip bone and I caress her breasts, tug at her clothes and remove them slowly. Then she’s naked and I’m bare bones on my back and she presses down into me, her tongue farther down and licking the vertebrae at the top of my neck and right there we fall in love. I can feel it and I know she feels it too and the sleeping bag becomes a vast universe that only we live in.
Our journey continues on. We walk for miles upon miles, our joints stiffen, and our muscles ache and plead for us to stop. We camp when the time feels right and by the fourth night we notice a change in the temperature, it is getting slightly colder. We can finally light a fire and we do and cook small dinners over it. I spread myself across her naked body each night and we fall more and more in love as if it’s an endless race where the finish line keeps getting farther and farther away.
The colder it gets the more coyotes we see. They scamper about on all sides of us and I can’t tell if we are following them or if they are following us. The lights have grown to giant fire diamonds and each night the view is better than the last. We embrace the ensuing cold and she revels in the fact that she can see her breath. She says it gives our conversations more character, a visibility to our words.
What do you think the lights are? She asks.
I have no idea, but we’ll find out soon. They get bigger each night so it means we are getting closer.
I can’t wait.
Me neither.
***
It’s the seventh or eighth night, I’m not completely sure, when we’re no longer surrounded by sand. It’s snowing and I know this but she doesn’t. She’s in awe, reaching her hands out to touch it as it floats past her, sticking out her tongue to taste it. She’s shivering but she hardly notices, she doesn’t mention anything to me about freezing. Our feet are buried in snow up to our ankles.
I can see now that the desert lights are nothing exemplary, nothing beyond this world. Dozens of albino skinned people, clad in fur coats, scatter about in front of us and hold kite strings. Their kites are box kites that soar above our heads and they all house a large candle in the middle, the great desert lights are revealed.
One of the albino men is pulling on his string, pulling the kite down from the night sky. It doesn’t look like all the other kites, the material looks tougher, it’s looser in the wind. He gets the kite all the way down and I recognize it. There’s my skin, stretched and contorted to fit the box shape. I run over to him and ask him where he found it.
I didn’t, he says. He blinks a few times and I can tell he’s finding it hard to believe he’s talking with a skeleton. It found me.
This whole time I’ve been staring at my skin, my skin leading me here to these snowy plains where albino skinned men launch candle lit kites into the sky. My skin is too damaged to put back on and I don’t want to take the man’s kite away. He says it found him anyway.
Someone taps me on the shoulder and I turn to see her and I’ve been so wrapped up in the cold and the sight of my long lost skin that I’d momentarily forgotten she was there. She’s naked and I see she has given her clothes to one of the albino men. He’s behind her, his fingers quick and stitching them together to form a new kite. He smiles and places a candle in the middle, then ties a string to it and lets it loose to join the others, and far away Bingo and all the others will clap and point as another desert light appears.
Here I am in frosty delight, with my love naked beside me, her veins rooting blue through her now pale skin and I grab her hand and we run across the snow as the albino man whom my skin found places a new candle in the middle, lights it and sends it back up. My past life is floating above me, my former wrists are tied together and form a corner of the kite and are flapping in the cold breeze, waving goodbye.
Then she stops and points and in the distance I can make out the shadow of a mountain and it’s so cold out that it just might be made of ice.
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About the Author
Alex Aro is a writer from Massachusetts. His work has been featured in Parnassus, Oberon’s Law, Jersey Devil Press and Electric Windmill Press. When he isn’t writing, he fronts metal bands Adversaries and Dearth.
“Desert Lights” © 2012 Alex Aro | Image (“Desert Faces”) © 2012 Maxwell Lee
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