Nomad

The desert is a killer to my people—a place of suffering and struggle that tolerates the most stubborn to make life within itself and changes on a whim to kill everything in sand and storm. Life is hard here, but it persists because it must. Rejects from everywhere else may end up in a place no one else can live. My people fear and respect the desert, for it shelters and hides much, but it always takes more than it provides, with limited resources. I look upon the desert without fear for the first time in my life. The death sentence that is the sun didn’t smite me. My naked flesh is whole and full of life, energy bubbling from me like I am a kid excited to jump into an aquarium.

Life is surely a dream... otherwise, nothing makes sense anymore.

My people are harsh, a necessity brought on by the place we call home. Every resource is allocated, and the weak, unproductive, unnecessary are culled to the desert—to either die or find life outside the Holds. Not much survives the Namid Desert, but those who do are revered and feared by those who rejected that fate. We are avoided like cursed ghosts, even though we neighbor each other—the surface and Hold dwellers. Ah..., I have truly become one of the surface dwellers. I could always go to Oakland—city life can't be too bad, right? No, I have no limits now. Oakland is the least of the places I can go. I don’t have to be a ghost that haunts these sands forever either. They rejected me—fuck them! I am a sandmad survivor, but I won’t be a desert ghost lingering here, waiting for death. I will become something else. I already am something else!

I don't really want to die, I've realized whilst torturing myself to stay alive.

Breathe in... hiccup a few times, gargling till my toes curl in my suffocating. Exhale... breathe, wheezing in quickly before I can even enjoy it. Exhale... I cough, hacking up a lung before getting my breaths back to an easy balance that’s maintainable without strangling myself. I curl and twist my feet into the sand, watching my tingling hands flush with life and energy. I still can’t believe everything is real, even as I stand and run along the sand crest.

"Ahhhh... woooh," I'm giddy with new life, heady with the discovery of this desert madness. Is this even real, or have I gone mad from heat stroke and dehydration? Maybe I’m already a desiccating thing, lost in its last dreams of a desert heaven. I stand at the top of the highest dune for kilometers, taking in the desert that no longer threatens me.

"Desert, you are all mine now. All of you as far as I can see are mine. What I'll do with you? Well, I’ll walk wherever I want; nothing you do can stop me. You hear that? I'm free to do whatever I want. I need nothing now! I need no one now! I have everything—I have the endless Namid Desert to wander and explore and drink from. You hear that? All is mine!"

I find myself shaking my fist into the wind, a sigh leaving me tired. I sit on the highest dune, watching the desert shift and change like a large monster bristling its flesh as day turns to twilight and then to night. My high dune is no longer the highest. The sun didn’t blister my skin or dry my mouth even at its peak; the sands have not cut or stung, even when driven by desert gusts. The night brings with it desert crabs emerging, camouflaged from beneath. The cold causes a shiver to pass through me, but it’s bearable. Maybe I’m just too sensitive to cold... my penis and testicles are trying to drive into my waist. Thirsty, hungry... Oh, I’m low on energy.

Standing, I take a few deep breaths to get myself ready for the breathing torture that will imbue me with energy. "Here goes..."

It takes a few weeks of wandering the desert without fear of wind, sun and sand for it to eventually become old. Most days in the desert are the same. With no one to share it with the desert seems to mock me my ability to survive it. 'You can survive me, then what?' it asks me rhetorically. I have nowhere to be, nothing to do, no one to share my sudden desert wealth with. 'What if everyone could walk the surface as I do? What if the desert tribes weren't just limited to staying in hole in the ground chasing water across the desert undergrounds like mice. I think these thoughts even as I imagine being the only desert walker, 'the ghost that conquered the desert' I can already imagine the stories.

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I stop to torture breath sustenance back into my self.

The sandWall keeps me from getting too close despite the energy and life filling my body. The sand chokes my breathe, stings and bleeds my eyes and scraps harshly against me skin stronger the deeper I try to enter. It's physically impossible to get close again so I walk its boundary, I've always wonder where the storm ends.

In over a week of walking I/m yet to see the end of it, fuck this.

"Stop," a voice says as two shapes shamble out of the sand dune into my path. I startle to a stop, but my alarm quickly subsides as I recognize the shambling shapes—bowed backs wrapped like mummies, freshly unearthed as sand falls off them. I am one of these creatures, I remind myself, standing tall and proud even in my nakedness as they flank me, watching with weary eyes.

"You are from the Hold?" the smaller one asks with a gratingly harsh voice, sending a shiver down my spine as the fear of becoming like him threatens to overtake me.

"No longer," I say, showing the missing finger on my left hand.

"Which Hold is so cruel as to send you into the desert without even a rebreather?" the taller ghost spits. "Yet he somehow survived. How did you survive the desert naked?" The smaller one attempts to poke me with a pole, but I swat it away.

"Do you treat all people who cross your path with such disrespect out in the sands? Or is courtesy abandoned at your exile?" I find myself annoyed, angry, scared...

"What use is courtesy to the walking dead?" the ugly voice croaks at me.

"So you also call yourselves ghosts? I've always wonder—"

"You are a ghost to those left behind now," the taller one says with some softness. He sighs, sticking his staff into the sand before retrieving a rebreather from a pouch on his hip and throwing it at my feet. "Here, no use in you dying too quickly now."

I look at him and wonder how much of what I've discovered I want to share with these wretched people. They're both wearing rebreathers to filter out the poison and sand from the air that would poison and rip into their soft insides. I think of our Holds, which hold limited populations dictated by the availability of space and water, forcing us to push our own people out into a harsh desert that's guaranteed death for anyone who stays here.

The men before me are indistinctive under their sand-protective wrappings, but by their shambling and postures, I know they're either old or sickly. I suddenly pity the two mummified people before me, and the smaller one gets angry, shouting something to the taller one in a dialect I do not follow.

"I don't need the rebreather, thank you." I throw it back, interrupting their bickering.

They look at me with suspicion and pity. "My friend thinks you've gone sunmad. How long have you been out here?" The taller one surveys me, getting closer. "Your skin is still soft, and your eyes are clear, so a day at most? A bit of advice: never reject water and a breather in the desert, friend."

I pity them. I fear being like them. I am one of them.

"This one is sunmad. Let's put him with the rest of the crazies," the short one shakes his head and shambles away from me, disinterested. The taller one seems curious.

"If you follow us, we can take you to others. We have crab snake eggs to share," he encourages.

I follow behind them until we walk on stone instead of sand. An isle of rock in an ocean of sand, with thin, shrunken people expelled from their holds sunk into little depressions in the stones for shade. Some gaze at me with empty eyes, others with pity or envy or hunger, which shrivels my testes as quickly as frost does.

We reach a small mouth, and the taller one shouts to announce our arrival before ducking his head and crawling into the cave. The small one looks at me and points with his head. I crawl into a space immediately cooler and fresher than the furnace outside.

"Why do you bring this man here, Kaizer? You know the newly culled are not mine to see to," a rasping voice of a woman wrapped head to toe in fennec hide, with not even her eyes visible, greets us.

"This one is sunmad," my tall escort says, indicating me as I survey the people in the shallow cave.

"The sunmad are yours to administer," the short one spits, every word grating on my nerves.

"He came to us as naked as he is now. He comes from the north and won't take a rebreather," Kaizer says with a shrug and leaves after exchanging a few more words.

"Welcome, stranger. I am Gloria. We do not have much here, but we share what we have and watch out for one another." A young man, covered in wraps and bowed low, offers me some clothes to cover myself. I accept it with a bow. I am offered a fresh crab, which I accept graciously, eating and drinking from it as I watch the circus around me mutely.

No one really says much of anything to me, all preoccupied in their own world. A man so thin he is skin and bones is being fussed over by the man who gave me the clothes and food. The woman who welcomed me is preoccupied, listening to a man whispering to himself, while another with a leg out in the sun watches it blister from the safety of the cave. Strangest of all is the figure deepest in the cave, who has no eyes, no nose, and no lips, leaning against the wall as everyone ignores them. The rise and fall of their chest is the only indication that they are not a skeleton but a living person.

What have I fallen into?