Desert Sand

The scorching heat reminded her of something she could not quite place. Perhaps it was the faint smell of dry earth, that dusty, mineral scent that seemed to rise from the ground itself after the sun had baked it for long enough. There was something ancient about it. Something stripped of everything unnecessary.

She looked down at her feet.

The sight of them brought with it an odd sensation, almost like looking at herself from somewhere outside her own body. They seemed familiar and unfamiliar at once. They were hers, obviously. She knew every small imperfection on them, every line, every mark. And yet, standing there in that immense expanse of sand, they looked strangely disconnected from her, as though they belonged to someone she had once known.

She tilted her head and stared.

She had removed her shoes for a little while, letting her bare feet feel the heat of the sand.

It was hot against her soles, almost too hot, but she stood there anyway, feeling the grains shift beneath her toes. Some were fine and soft, slipping between her toes like flour. Others were coarser, catching against the tender places on her feet. She pressed down a little harder, letting herself feel the ground beneath her.

It was the most she had felt in a long time.

Not thought. Not remembered. Not imagined.

Felt.

What a strange thing it was, to feel something so completely and yet know that the feeling could not be carried with you through your existence. It could only be felt in that one moment, and then it would become memory, and memory was never quite the same thing.

She looked down at her feet again.

They still did not look as though they belonged to her.

The faint bluish veins beneath the skin seemed almost too delicate for the woman she imagined herself to be. There were little creases around her toes, tiny marks she had never noticed before, and the skin had browned slightly from years of sun and walking and simply being alive.

But she was digressing.

She was getting maudlin again, letting her thoughts wander into places she had no intention of visiting.

She looked up at the sky and automatically raised a hand to shield her eyes from the sun, which seemed impossibly bright against the cloudless blue.

She squinted.

Then, almost immediately, she lowered her gaze again.

Her feet.

She wriggled her toes and felt the soft sand slip between the gaps.

There was something comforting about that.

Something simple.

A sensation that required no explanation.

Then she noticed the dirt.

A faint line had gathered around one toenail. There was still a small healing cut near the side of her foot, a souvenir from the garden the week before, when she had gone barefoot without thinking.

She wondered if it had healed enough by now that she no longer had to worry about an infection from standing barefoot in the desert.

Who knew what lived in sand?

Bacteria, certainly. Fungi. Spores. Microscopic organisms that had adapted to survive heat and dryness and conditions that would have killed almost anything else. Perhaps there were thousands of them beneath her feet, moving invisibly through the grains in ways she would never see or understand.

A world within a world!

An existence beneath another existence, carrying on completely unnoticed.

She imagined it for a moment. Tiny things. Invisible things. Life going on beneath the surface, entirely indifferent to whether she knew it was there.

She almost laughed at herself.

Of all the things she could be thinking about.

She had finally managed to stand in the middle of a desert with nothing around her but sky and sand, and somehow her mind had found a way to worry about bacteria.

Typical!

That was what her mind did.

It filled empty spaces.

It picked at things.

It found questions where there should have been silence and then blamed the silence for being inconsiderate.

She lifted one foot, then the other, and watched the sand fall away from her skin.

She loved the feeling!!!

She did not want to think too much about why.

Thinking had a way of taking things apart.

For a moment she considered putting her shoes back on. The heat was becoming almost unbearable now. She had always had a higher threshold for pain, or at least she liked to think she did. Perhaps she had simply become accustomed to discomfort. There was a difference, she supposed, although she had never bothered to decide what it was.

Still, she did not put her shoes on.

There was something about the heat beneath her feet that she did not want to lose.

Perhaps it reminded her that she was alive.

Alive!

Such a small word for something so enormous.

She looked down once more, wriggling her toes beneath the sand.

Then she looked up.

The light was almost blinding.

She raised a hand to shield her eyes, squinting into the distance. The desert seemed endless, the horizon dissolving into a pale line where the sand met the sky.

She lowered her hand.

Something had caught her attention.

She tilted her head.

There was a shimmer in the distance.

At first she thought nothing of it. The air above the sand was moving, rippling in the heat, making the horizon appear to breathe.

A mirage?

Of course!

She had seen them before, and every time she saw one, it felt like the first time.

Fascinating.

Science aside, there was something almost absurd about the way light could persuade the eye to believe in something that wasn't there. Water where there was none.  Shapes that seemed to float above the earth before disappearing the moment you tried to make sense of them.

She watched anyway.

The shimmer seemed to thicken.

For a moment there was only light, then a darker smudge appeared within it. She blinked, rubbed at the corner of one eye and looked again.

Her eyes were beginning to catch faint prismatic colours from staring too long into the brightness. She squinted and looked away for a second, then back again.

It was still there.

She stood very still.

The darker shape remained in the distance, wavering slightly in the heat.

She narrowed her eyes.

Was it a person?

She couldn't tell.

She tilted her head again, trying to make sense of the shape through the shimmering air.

It seemed to be getting clearer.

Or perhaps her eyes were simply adjusting.

She watched.

And waited. © Lyia Meta