By Jess Golden
It was frightening when the soundtrack first started to skip and flip over, but now I’m getting used to it. I close the windows at night, lock the doors, and settle in to listen.
The stream is always the green song’s most obvious thread. It trips along in its own impossible time signature, ignoring the insects’ steady percussive call and overshadowing the sway and shake of leaves. Then everything chokes into silence—I hold my breath during the pause—and a new beat picks up in the scratch of ocotillo branches. The soloists vary. Tonight a coyote shuffles around and pads off, having found only mooncold dirt and a tangle of brittle grass.
I used to have dreams. I still can’t recall them, but I would wake in the night and feel dry sunlight hardening on my forehead, and I would know I’d been remembering the skin of an old duplex peeling off in strips, paint chips scratching my arms and clustering under my nails like chalk when I would lean against the outside of our house and pick at it.
This is something else. In the morning there are trails of sand on the floorboards.
The sand keeps my feet wrapped in a white film of dust, worms its way into the cracks of my skin, mummifies me little by little while I dance around the kitchen.
Sometimes my grandchildren come over to play in the stream and tell me stories. They talk about a robin’s very orange belly or the earthquakes trapped inside their friend. They make other stories feel so far away.
Aside from the occasional dream, I hadn’t thought of those things in a long time. But then the desert started to visit with its songs, the same ones from so many years ago, jagged lullabies set on repeat. They jolt me back to ribs scattered with stains and lightning bugs in jars.
One night I’m listening to small paws scratching at the cracked dust outside when I hear a new verse: a metal door creaks and slams. A spectral car pulls away and I see drooping carnations, an apology left to wither in the heat. Then the warm static cloud of my hair clinging to velour seats, a window cranked halfway down, the blue outlines of different horizons. Faded marks on wrong sheets. Momma’s eyes unable to meet mine. Then the landscapes again in reverse. Fish with a hook caught in our cheek, we are dragged back to the limp flowers and the rest of it.
When the green hills first began to give way to a familiar wasteland, it only happened once every few months. Then I would scrub everything clean and forget I had ever really believed in it. Now I drift off every night amid the howl and scratch of desert songs, and each morning there are new piles of sand.
I follow my cleaning rituals carefully, brushing evidence from the tables and chairs and shelves, then sweeping it all out the door, but it’s exhausting to keep up with, and to be honest, some days I’m tempted to leave it there—to let it pile up around me, softening the corners with grit until this cabin I’ve called home for thirty years becomes just another dune in an endless expanse of them.
Jess Golden currently lives in a national park in Alaska. Other work has appeared in Gingerbread House.