An epic or a nursery rhyme? One and the same, perhaps?
I glance at the cat, curled upon a brown corduroy pillow in the corner of the far chair. Snoring.
As I gaze, she awakens, stares back at me, 'Get back to work.'
I comply and she nods approvingly, stretches, goes back to her napping position.
The backdrop of civil indoor living fades.
Bookshelves shimmer and melt from wood and steel to stone and limb.
Brown shag becomes a patch of parched brown ground, overgrazed, hungry.
Dirt speckled lizard skitters between burnt stalks of eriogonum,
Blending rapidly into the granite-limned dust.
"How am I here," confusion scatters like frightened ants
As the thumping of a skin drum lumbers across the desert floor
Up the scarred gully, past brittle bone baked by decades into little more than tracery in the hardpack.
Skittles of sand drift from the sandstone outreach looming to the south.
I stand, dust off my butt, and attempt to clamber up the gully wall, to see.
The desert sky is harsh in its cloudless blue, so bright it is dark, a dome inverted over endless tan
Miles of gentle slope broken only by distance, dull copper at the far edge of it all.
Behind, the desert hills rise as foothills to a scoured, jagged range,
Its face pocked with yucca, Joshua tree, stunted juniper, the promise of pine.
I teeter, balanced just beneath the gully's edge, eyes seeking landmarks. Anything.
The drums stop. A puff of dust down-gully rises, dissipates slowly
As if a thousand feet have halted in unison.
Silence, but for a gentle breeze rattling dried seedpods that shiver at its passage.
The breeze whispers as it passes overhead, dislodging a ribbon of sand
That cascades down the gully wall to the long-dry wash below.
A solitary anguished scream! echoed by a drawn-out skreee of a suddenly circling hawk...
I duck quickly down down down- I can't have been seen! -
Lose tenuous hold and footing, and go clatterstumping backwards into the wash.
The silence hangs ominously in midair.
I hold my breath.
Exhale slowly, slower than the sand-making process, slowly, silently.
Eyes squeezed shut against the dark brilliance of the noonday desert sky.
Breathe out.
Begin an inhale quieter than the dreams of a mouse.
I cannot be seen. Not here. Not now. I don't know why, but I must not.
I open my eyes painfully, slowly as the drums begin a departing cadence -
Boom-bum-bum-huh BOOM-bum-bum-huh -
Open them in time to watch the hawk spiral down and land,
Fold white-tipped wings against its sides and crouch,
Then shudder its head and return to human form.
Perched upon the gully's edge above, toes curled, he slowly rises, stands,
Stares south toward the squatting coppery hills, squints carefully,
Eyes aimed at the sandstone outcropping, then,
Waist-length black braids slapping at his midriff,
He leaps into midair, morphs, flies.
I blink, disbelieving,
and my desk returns to view.
The cat yawns, performs a full-body stretch, turns in place,
and sleeps, smiling to herself.
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