Stranded

-Consciousness calls. It sounds like the creak of rusted screen doors being harassed by the arid cold breezes of the desert. I wake with a headache, on a tattered mattress in a run down motel room. The kind of place that seems a mirage in the summer. Now, simply the frozen ruins of someone’s dream, harboring the ghosts and illusions long since lost. My eyes open and I can see the dust swirls in the room. The bed creaks as I raise my eyes to make out the darkened images. The shades are drawn and the light just barely manages to sneak in and scatter shadows. It becomes swallowed up the farther in it creeps. I sit on the edge of the bed, my movement accompanied by the score of ancient bed springs. In the morning’s cold I cannot place what “I” is or what the being that I am was. I get up and let the light flood the room, flood the decrepit wallpaper, the stain darkened carpet, the dust still swirling in the space. There are drool stains on the pillows. I look out the window and stare into the empty desert, the dust dancing with the cold breeze, and the horizon igniting in an array of color saturation. I am abandoned. I am alone. The only car in the lot. I make my way. Everything has turned to dust. The “Welcome” sign at the entrance to the dirt lot reads “ ome” and it continues to erode. I reach my car, reach into it and pull from it what remains of the seeds for my new life. The small carry-on comes loose sending the pile of dust into the air. The shape of the car fractures, diminished into nothing more than the piled particles. The small storm subsides, leaving a couple of half buried skeletons rising out of the pile, right around where my trunk used to be. The things we leave behind don’t always stay. The things we bury and try to hide are never gone entirely. I wince at the sight. Fractures in the craniums. This was the rattling that interrupted the highway’s secrets in the dark of night. This is how I ended up here, where ever here is. This is how I never left, even though the house burned down, even though I’m here. I open the carry-on and pull out the change of clothes inside. I force a smile and wonder if it could ever be that easy. A new me. I put it away and take out the hammer also packed into the case. I start at the fractures and continue until the pile of dust my car used to be is covered in the grain like particles of bone and marrow. I stand there, in the empty dirt lot. The sun struggling with the clouds. The arid breeze picking up, having chosen a groggy sweeping up to that point. The air is filled with dust swirls. The “ ome” rises into the space around me and becomes nothing. The pile of dust and marrow reticently shivers as it intermingles and rises in the breeze’s harried sweeping. I laugh. It echoes through the desert. Only I hear it.