The desert stretched out forever in front of us, split in half by a two-lane road pocked with worn craters like asteroids had rained down on the asphalt long ago. We had been driving for days and not yet seen a single cloud. The relentless blue sky bore down on us from all sides, no tree line to hide where it dropped off the edges of our world.
Short, gnarled trees clung to the rocks and dirt. An oil pump churning in the distance should have been evidence of human life but instead felt like it had always been there extracting blood from the earth since the beginning of time.
The only thing that felt new was us in our pick-up truck rattling towards the horizon, its wheels knocked out of alignment by the countless potholes. You occasionally wrestled it back into our lane and I asked why you bothered. There was no oncoming traffic. There would never be any oncoming traffic. You just shrugged.
I leaned out the window like a bored dog, letting the dusty wind scour my face, and stared into the sideview mirror at all our possessions behind us in the truck bed. The sky swallowed up every sound except the flap flap flap of the poorly tied tarp. I told you to let me tie it down next time because we both knew my knots were better. You said the tarp was a stupid idea anyway. It had never rained here in living memory.
A promise of water lingered on the horizon. We knew it was a lie, merely the bending of light through perpetual heat waves, but we still limped towards it. The road chewed at our tires, the fuel gauge’s needle wobbled in its little red square. I reached for your hand. We would be rocks and dirt and dust soon.
We were too busy gazing at each other to see a gaping pothole, bigger than all the others our truck had gone over. The front passenger side tire burst on it like a ripe boil, tossing us violently side to side. You navigated the truck onto the shoulder with care it didn’t deserve. I climbed out to assess the damage. The bones of some unrecognizable animal jutted out of the dirt and I nearly impaled my foot on one. You said to watch my step with laughter in your voice.
The heat felt more oppressive outside the truck like the sky was admonishing us for venturing out of our little moving shelter. The tire was a blown out open wound sat at an unsettling angle that indicated a broken axle. Even if we hadn’t used up our last spare tire one hundred miles ago, there was no fixing this. We would have go on foot, I said. You cursed at the sky.
We took what we could carry. The horizon stretched further away and a burning stench filled the now still air. The blue sky bled out into a colorless void. We walked on. I said we would reach our destination. You looked at me sideways. The horizon continued to stretch further away.
Somewhere along the way your body quit. I left you there on the roadside for the things under the rocks. I had never seen them but I knew they were there, waiting. I could feel them. If night ever fell they would get me too, but I kept walking. There was no sun in the sky but it was so bright. I didn’t cry because it would just waste water. I wished I had remembered to take your sunglasses.
The road looked like a botched surgical incision across the skin of some behemoth. Maybe it was falling open behind me, but I was too afraid to look back and see. The horizon was no longer visible, now lost in a white hot haze. The sky had finally slid off the world.
I kept walking. I would reach our destination, whatever it was.