Tucumcari

Scan the expanse, where the difference between land and sky can scarcely be discerned. Both abundantly pink. Both deafeningly silent. Where is the sun. Behind stretchy strips of wool. Pause. Gaze among the mesas, miles of necks without heads. Desert décolletage. The slope of tanned shoulders, the climb of jagged collarbones. Then, decapitation. Press on. Ignore small pains from large plants. Throngs of agave. Yucca. White sage. Rabbitbrush. Crispy fingernails digging into your flesh. Beehive cactus. Danger.

A low hiss hovers, bugs that cannot be seen. Bigger creatures wait for nightfall, gasping for their lives, their breath caught in the branches of the creosote bush. The final casualties of summer exhale. A dust storm will come soon. Keep going. Walk further. You have to.

Vegetation fades. Only red dirt shifts beneath your feet. The horizon breathes. Breathe with it. A muted but pervasive beat.

Highest heat. Saturday. You took your mother’s half-dead daisies while she buttered her morning toast. They frown profoundly from your palm, thirsty. Release them. You have arrived.

Something had been around overnight. Coyotes. A bobcat maybe. Vultures wouldn’t survey until Monday. Being met with more corpse is more than your stomach can handle. Evacuate it to the starved landscape. Your leg flings forward. Heaps of loose dirt slide over the lump. Powder her with minced clay. Hide. Deny. Negate. Grasp for the tools to cope. Fail. Try again.

The woman doesn’t move but everything else does. Mountains in the distance are the color of cornflower. Between them and you, gradients of green. Taupe and sienna underfoot. You, pale yellow in the desert spectrum.

You have always been strong. Be that now. Brace yourself against the tornado of bricks. Reality like a hailstorm. Like the flash flood you and Mom were trapped in when you were nine, stranded in Santa Fe on your way to visit great aunt Magda, Mom’s Jetta so submerged you nearly had to abandon it. Three men in cowboy hats appeared from nowhere, sloshed to the car in waders and pushed you to safety. They were gone as swiftly as they surfaced. That night, recounting the terror over frijoles adobados, Magdalena lifted her linen top to reveal a raised and wrinkled salmon-colored slash extending diagonally from shoulder to hip.

“Auntie’s weathered worse storms than this.” Mom stepped in, stirred the beans.

At school you would proudly inform your classmates of Magda’s lightning scar, delivering the message with pride and crazy eyes. Una bruja.

After dinner you pored through the Sears Wish Book, lounging on Auntie’s plush carpeted floor, illuminated by chunky Christmas bulbs draped across the stone hearth. Circling pictures of plastic toys until your fists were blackened by the pages’ ink.

Stagger away from the decay. You’re not Magda. Not as strong as people think.

Slurp water from your canteen. Spit remnants of vomit. Light the joint you packed. Smoke until you are too high to remember how to cry. Scream. Listen to your savage moan reach the furthest butte. It boomerangs back. Gulp it down. Laugh for no other reason than there is no one around to question it.

Feel everything for her because she can’t. Every red prick on your ankles beginning to sting. The way the air tastes past noon. Thick moisture on your eyelids and lips. Gritty orange ground. You are stoned now. Dusty air coating your nostrils. Your soul macerated to pulp.

Like the brunette in the shoddy rectangle, you shrink into the blistering terrain, heartrate elevated but body lower than ever, in the early makings of your own grave. Inhale like the ocean does in San Francisco, taking everyone on a ride with it. Let her go. You’ve done it before, ill-equipped to shoulder the responsibility of closure.

Mom took you to him once—well, not to him, but to the closest you’d ever be. A spontaneous red eye. You sped through Arrivals as Mom beelined for a taxi. At the InterContinental, Mom paid for a suite and promptly passed out in the king bed. You took yourself to breakfast on foot. Four hotcakes later, you boarded a bus marked 38 OCEAN BEACH.

You were eleven.

A valley of complicated sand met you at the end of the line—seaweed-strewn, littered with charred bonfire logs and shells of other people’s lives, bottlecaps rusted by the wet, salty air. Cigarette butts. Broken crab claws. Fishing line.

You had been to Florida to visit your abuela. You’d seen the ocean. This wasn’t that. This beach was a cold, blustery night, shadows a fire makes as it crackles in darkness. The beach in Miami had been sunny and smooth. It had not moved you. Ocean Beach was imperfect, a dense mist veiling everything in sight. You were home.

Stare at the skyline. Your heartbeat migrates to your temples. Touch the grit like you did on the cold shore in San Francisco. Stick your fingers deeper. Arrive at the part that feels like a secret, as if finding a part of the earth no one ever has before. The joy that triggers!

“Muffin!” Mom’s voice was a butcher knife, her elasticated neck protruding from the shower curtain. An overcompensating ostrich. “Where’d ya go?”

You quietly removed the plastic bag in the hotel ice bucket and emptied wet sand from your jeans into it, packed the secret in your suitcase before Mom emerged in a fluffy white bath towel.

You’d thought about San Francisco every day since then, how you’d stared out the airplane window flying away, wondering which dot was your dad.

Every restraint loosens, cuffs unclamping. Buckles and belts snap off your limbs. The vast violence persists. Ravenous chirping everywhere.

Pull at your pocket. Crumpled plastic meets your fingertips. Crack its twisted seal. Empty the fist of sand into the shallow chasm. It does nothing to expunge the truth, but it does everything to release something invisible—scrap piles of ghosts caught amidst the death of the desert, waiting for a strong enough breeze to blow them out.