Sarahribu

The horizons are empty, but that really is nothing new. He would take anything these days, a burnt out shack, a bundle of thorny brush, a half eaten carcass picked over by vultures. Locking his rifle above his head, Maram strikes a severe line against the endless frozen tides of the desert. His glasses were small and hyper functional to counteract the sand-blindness that had blighted him for far too long since leaving the city to try and eke out an unnatural extension of his life on the sands.
Bell is his trusted steed, glorious and awkward all the same. Camels were slaughtered and eaten in the cities where they no longer have any use for beasts of burden, but plenty of use for large slabs well exercised of protein for the weak limbed kids blighted from the heartbreak of millions. The cities are like animals, anthropomorphised by the half-dead souls rammed into every crevice. Life has always been hard in the desert, in the black tents that billow like storm clouds that a long way back he assumes his ancestors lived in. Camels always make it easier.

Every day the world slips just a little further away from him. His past life, with lovers and meals and eyesight, where he never had to put his shoulder back in joint because the kick from the rifle was too much stress for it to take. He cannot see if there was a rabbit on the horizon anymore, but having its present bulk, tricked out with addendums to the stock and the muzzle to make it easier, the brass still gleaming thanks to his constant handling, a solid metal security blanket against the monsters in the night.

The nights out here are a punch to the chest. The sun descends into its bed exactly as it has since the start of history and the darkness rises, but if it is your first night in the desert you would be forgiven if you found yourself overwhelmed. There was a time where the desert was the last place on earth you could see the beauty of the night sky, and at that time there was a hope that maybe having hope wasn’t a useless human folly. Thousands were still there as the last of the stars seemed to shudder before they were sliced out of existence as the now omnipresent sheath rolled over, the sky is now ribbed for no stargazer’s pleasure, possible astrologers forever silenced.

He huffs laughter to himself. Every omnipresent cloud of death and destruction has a silver lining.

He used to read horoscopes waiting for his sister in the doctor’s office. She was ill a lot, her pale hand weighted down with the jewellery her husband would buy her, shiny baubles to preserve his dying love. The doctors could do nothing, and eventually the money ran out, the jewellery taken away and pawned for more medicine that made no difference, and his sister was buried swiftly, an unpreserved body in a unprepared grave.

The cold, after the oppressive heat of the day, never stops being sudden, shocking and a stealer of the breath a man holds dear. He is back now, his scarred corneas show the black behemoth of his home.

Dismounting with a exuberance and flair aimed only for the invisible onlookers that make up the omnipresent pressure of there being someone in the room, Maram grins at the nothingness and ducks inside the tent. His meagre possessions are spread out uselessly, in piles; the cacophonograph plays music loudly and distortedly, spurred on with an affectionate kick, pitch bent beyond repair as the needle scratches across warped disks. With no chance of a replacement you get used to the mocking pastiche of music. You have to.

Bell huffs outside, trotting in circles and grunting. Maram ignores her for now, and digs his daily bread out of the sand oven. Even the small amount of flour he has left now is nearly all sand, nutrition a hollow word from a time when the people always could get something to top up what they didn’t like to eat, when people had glossy hair and perfect white teeth. Hair, teeth and nails, the first things to go, the last things you would have thought you’d missed.

They have got so far today. Bell is so beautiful, a reassuring tower of strength and understanding but he can feel her tired and starting to break, the burden of taking him half way across the world taking its toll on such a magnificent beast. He goes outside and examines her, the light dim but just enough to see her sad eyes with their caramel lashes flutter at his touch. They are linked, his magnificent steed, linked through their shared blood matted in her fur from travel and the tracks of her tears. He touches her wounds and massages feeling back into her tired legs and sings to her simple songs of famous love and the purity of childhood, until his own eyes grow heavy with sleep and he drifts off pressed against her solid, still labouring bulk.

He passed the skeletons of other men fleeing the cities as they clawed their way out of hell. There is a radius of bones around the major metropolises, the first few miles they are smaller, more delicate, the initial burst of the unprepared. As you get further away you hit the bodies of the men and their horses, mules, sweet donkeys liberated from beachfronts. The whips and chains lay testament to the breaking points of man and beast.

He tries not to think too hard about what the camel skeleton he saw a few miles back means for him. Bell grunts impatiently as he gulps down water, the two of them swathed in once-white fabric to keep off the haze of the morning sun. He loads her aching back with apologetic whimpers and clicks at her to head off, the horizon unbroken all the way until the end.