Desert Rose

One

There was a full moon that night, and Jilly liked to watch a full moon. The sounds of a swamp wrapped around her—frogs, insects, the quick splash of some slithery thing breaking the surface. On nights like this, the twisted mangroves stood out in dark relief, the air was not heavy or sticky, the crawling things on the periphery were hidden by shadow, and the silvery moonlight gave people a strange, magical cast, making it appear as if they belonged, as if living here were okay.

“Jilly-girl, you come in here for a minute?” a large-framed, dark figure called from the doorway of the squat little house built mostly from salvaged materials.

“Comin’, Mama,” said Jilly.

Two

Fred Anderson sat cross-legged on a dune in the Nevada desert. The pale white flesh of his naked body was starting to burn, despite the liberal coat of sunscreen he had applied. His bare head was in particularly bad shape, its sensitive skin unaccustomed to the sun. The toupee that usually covered it lay just forward of his right knee, the last vestment he had stripped from himself. Fred had sand in his crack and his right testicle had shifted into an untenable position for meditation. He ignored it all as best he could. His mind was clear of such worldly concerns, after all. He was one with his surroundings. If he stayed like this long enough, something was supposed to happen. “An enlightened state,” the books had read, “a true communion with the element of Fire.” An epiphany of some sort, anyway, an opening up of the universe, an incredible freedom of understanding. Fred unfocused his eyes, making the horizon of rolling dunes blur into a sepia field, and ignored the tiny black scorpion that had crawled down his ankle and perched on the big toe of his left foot.