I am on an alien planet with a barren landscape. The boulders are red and piled up in some places into mountains. At one point in time, the surface ripples like a long, slow tidal wave of earth, which explains the strange fauna, all very sturdy with flat surfaced faces and bodies. I see two horse-like beasts flat against the boulders of a slope. They are gray and immobile, but they detach as I watch, and they separate and heave themselves up the slope…traveling. The scene is depressing, especially the bulky, graceless, sluggish animals. I am alone…wandering. I seldom encounter other people and nearly always at a distance. They are wanderers, survivors, scavengers like me. I have settled down now in an enclave of red boulders at some elevation. I can look down a slope, and I can see across the barren, rocky landscape. Sometimes I see a wanderer or a pair of people in the distance. I am looking out from this desolate aerie when I am threatened by a pair of men from behind. They try to bully me into doing something. I don’t know what they want, and I don’t think they know either. It’s not possible to bully me because there’s nothing I want to protect or live for. I’m immune to their threats, taunts or violence. My morbid passivity dispels the aggression of the two rough and burly men so they seat themselves, instead, at a boulder as if at a café. I bring them what I have, a little water in a salvaged, worn, plastic container. More people, all haggard and rough, come to the red boulder enclave, and I serve them what I have, bits of food or scant water all in deteriorating containers or poorly-crafted bowls of red clay. A man and woman come to the improvised diner in the barrens, and I bring the woman a little milk in a broad, plastic container like the bottom of a 2-liter soda. She is hot, dirty and tired, so she tosses the milk like water against her throat and chest to cool herself. For the first time, my emotions flare, and I cry out in distress over the precious milk. “More valuable than gold…!” The regret is piercing, but brief, and I go back to a red boulder where more of the rare, nourishing milk sits at the bottom of a deteriorating container, and I take it to the woman to drink. My mom appears to help me clean up. I have piles of clean, folded rags with which I wipe out the bowls and other plastic ware. She expects and looks around for water, but I explain that there isn’t enough for washing, so we must settle for wiping with these towels. Another rough stranger complains about the conditions, at which I slam down my towel in my fist against a boulder and cry, “It’s the whole damn solar system…!” By this I mean that it isn’t just this world or this little, red rock diner, so this person won’t find better conditions anywhere and will just have to get used to it. A pair of wanderers, probably father and son, come into the diner while I am busy, but I see the boy looking at a little, picture frame I have set upright at an angle amidst the crude dinnerware on a boulder. The frame is white porcelain with tiny, pink roses painted on it. It is square, about 3 inches in both dimensions. In gilt lettering, it says “love,” but there’s no image contained in the frame. It’s empty.
Recent Comments
