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.

What are you doing for your birthday? I am genuinely interested, because I’m so torn at the moment whether to be prudent or to do something so that in the future I can use it as an anecdote at dinner parties.
While we’re sitting around, let me tell you about my fantasies. Not sexual, most of my sexual fantasies are uninspired and laconic. You could probably even call them brusque, functional. No, my sexuality is not the interesting part of my brain. It’s the holidays’ part that is the fantasies you want to hear about.

When I was twenty-one I almost blew my entire savings on a trip to Korea after exams. I was tired, my body felt like a worn out husk, a maize of ennui, if you will. The mixture of a final project about collapsing economies of the 90s, plus downtime habits of soap operas and a life long love story based on the potentiality of a life in a country I don’t know. I checked out, a stubby finger with a dissertation induced screen-tan hovering over the booking page and chickened out. Instead I got drunk and bought a jacket I never wearr. My vigour dwindled into rigor, exams and graduation passed as a blur. In retrospect the money came to use during the obligatory unemployable graduate period, where I flitted between family members to thoroughly wear out my welcome as the useless sponger only a bachelors degree can make a girl.

I was gifted with the storybook event that my graduation, the moment I had dreamed since I was a little girl detesting graphics and steaming in her sexual tension, coincided with my 22nd birthday. It’s the stuff epilogues of films are made of. I escaped the grasp of education, my seductive mistress, back to my adopted hometown, twisting from her grip, no longer special, mentally complete in accordance with state guidelines. My friends and I got drunk for two days and abused a DSLR camera in the summer sunshine, popping fresh cherries between our teeth. It was a beautiful birthday.
It should have been a turning point in my life, but I find it hard to reinvent myself in late June. The sunshine is so beautifully dappled; everyone joyous and half nude, the freckles on cute girls’ faces out to play. I’ve always been someone to reinvent herself when the seasons wane to coolness and the social skin sheds a little easier.
(The year before it, uncharacteristically for my birthday but par for the course for this damp isle, rained. We camped in a humid marquee in my back garden as the country flooded. Bouncy castles cancelled due to electrocution risk, which could possibly be ironic. Boys kissed, pizzas were made in awkwardness and couples who were not me fucked in the rain. I turned 21 under two feet of water.

All I remember from my 6th birthday was I was a pirate and fell in the courgette patch. I learnt that supermarkets lie to us, those fuckers are spiky.

My 10th birthday involved both the top floor and the lower basement of the world’s tallest hotel, and my best friend at the time forcing me to buy her a present with my birthday money. Three months later I confronted her, screaming histrionics outside of the year 6 classroom. I remain effortlessly classy and tediously belated.)

Since I became old enough to insist that my parents leave me alone on my most special of days I have stuck to the tried and true equation that Sexually Ambiguous Teens + Alcohol + Bouncy Castle = Unparalleled awesomeness not even Barney Stinson could aspire to.
I turn 23 in just under three months. Without the protective cocoon of my parents’ money and expansive garden I fear my bouncy castle dreams are gone, and so it comes back to holidays, and indulging. I like the idea of flying off to some tiny island somewhere, a bit of non-conventional fluff, wearing an indecent swimming costume and frolicking with non-venomous wildlife. How about a week on a half-forgotten Malaysian island eating more durian than any human could theoretically eat and getting ridiculously sunburnt, followed by a week drinking sugarcane juice in the monolithic shadow of my childhood? When I think of the Asia I grew up in the first thing I think of is fruit, because it bookends it nicely. When I was a pasty child I was unenthusiastic about our move until I was given a travel book, nothing sophisticated, I think it might have been a Rough Guide. I never could be bothered to read books if I could fake out of it through being cunning but I fixated on one picture of a smorgasbord of tropical fruit, the real stuff, mangosteen, jackfruit, rambutan and the queen, the sexually aggressive owner of my social decadence, the durian. This new life was no longer something I refused to think about, instead my eye-enlarged stomach focused on the orgy of tastes to explore and delight in.
(For my first birthday my parents love to tell me that they bought punnets of squashy-delicious summer fruit and watched with delight as I gorged myself stupid on it.)

I teeter on the seesaw of indecision over whether to have an empire themed party, because while the idea of a late Victorian themed party (where there can be cross dressing and gin) appeals, especially since I can make all the Raffles jokes I like and no one can stop me, the whole concept teeters on the edge of racist, which makes me have frothy bubbles of distaste. When it comes down to it, I could do all manner of sensible or outrageous things, not only with my personal public holiday but with my life en generalé, because the only thing that has the potential for stopping me is my own brain, spending habits and social conventions. Perhaps for once, the 27th of June will finally be the day to make a big change.