A Word Story: The Last of Mrs. Stephens
(published in Kestrel)
The purely white gypsum sand began swamping the forward cockpit swiftly and hissingly where John Stephens the anthropologist was just being killed by the snapped-off end of a propeller blade, the very moment that his transcriptionist, Emily Myers, known pejoratively among the great man's admirers as "Mrs. Stephens", was being hurled from his lap with the only twist that could have assured her survival, so that she was soon lying unconscious, and miraculously whole, at the dune's parted crest, as in the back cockpit, white sand up to his chin, Gatreaux came to, sputtering.
He had done his best, when the machine had stalled. Without power, and swiftly descending, he had navigated the steeples of the Organ Pipe Mountains. He had been looking for a salt bed on which to set down, when, as though it were some anchorite with a longing to begin an ascetic devotion upon the dazzling albino nakedness spreading suddenly below, the Breguet had plunged, buried its nose in one of the thousands of great dead dunes.
Gatreaux unbuckled. He clamped his gloved hands on the side coaming and made an upward lunge; settled; breathed; and lunged again, and this time managed to kick his boot tip up into the nave of the windshield. Scissored back, he rested. He flipped up his goggles, blinked, and strained, sniffing and blinking, to determine if the engine was afire. It was not; a bright breeze salted sand into his eyes, and so he flipped down the goggles. And heaved himself backward, straightening his legs, groaning, until he was lying across the top of his cockpit. He swung around and rolled off the plane. He was satisfied to find no part of him broken; but the old wound in his shoulder throbbed and he knew he must have jarred it in the impact.
He turned and swiftly now began to bail the front cockpit. The sand flowed freely and heavily cool. As soon as he had scooped a handful aside, three more would avalanche in from the crest. Impatient with this futility, he reached his arm down through the sand-reached up to the point of his shoulder. Beneath, his fingers found a warm, gritty slime and, then, a forehead, from which something blubbery was slowly gushing. He reached down further, found the neck, tested it patiently for life. There was a silent moment of wind and sunlight; and then he pulled his arm out.
John Stephens was a Harvard Professor who had uarrele himself after the likes of Baden Powell. Every movement of his body bespoke his pride at having successfully thwarted the expectations of his type. He was no effete academic, but in fact a man of action.
At Gatreaux's Santa Fe airstrip, Stephens appeared mounted on a gray steed. Behind him, adobe buildings of pink and tan shone in the green valley, like teeth in a water serpent's mouth.
"Are you the aviator, Jean Gatreaux?" he called out in French. Gatreaux uarreled that he was, and Stephens introduced himself and then continued: "I have need of your services, sir. I am planning a small side-expedition to the Mescalero Apache villages in the state's southern reaches. I would very much like to go by air. I'm a great lover of these machines, you see. I consider them the future of the Race. What is more, I am taken with the advantages to be gained by descending from the clouds among the Mescaleros-in the guise of a Sky God. It strikes me that this would be the perfect way of convincing them to permit me to view their sacred dances. It's essential, if I am to get on with my scholarship."
"There are others who can take you, if you want to go south," Gatreaux said, shrugging. He didn't like flying over the southern part of the state, he remembered the region too well from the journey he had made from Mexico, after smuggling in his pirated Bregeut biplane, piece by piece, through the Port of Vera Cruz. During that journey he had had many frights. The sky around the Mescalero land had seemed especially unpredictable. There had been sudden gusts and strange whimsies of lightning. He had landed in the desert near Alamagordo, which was hardly a town at all, and had spent several nights there waiting out the storms in the mountains. He had sat out on the balcony of his hotel watching the lightning flash in great blue chains, revealing the piney, rounded hides between the cliffs. And long after the lightning had subsided, it had kept him from sleep, by the ear-splitting memories it had evoked in him.
"I don't like to go south," he said.
"Why is that? Are you superstitious in some way about the south?"
"A man can have his own reasons for not wanting to do a thing."
"You consider the south dangerous for aerial machines?" Stephens sneered it with a surprising show of cheek. "Or perhaps you don't think I've the stomach for a less than comfortable journey? If so, you needn't concern yourself. My last book concerned the headhunter tribes of southern New Guinea."
Gatreaux said nothing. Once, he might have taken umbrage at these words. But there was no part of him left that cared, he now realized. In fact, there was nothing of him left at all. He knew it was just another symptom of his malaise-of his nothingness-that he let Stephens talk him into coming back into town and discussing the matter over lunch.
Stephens had already determined on one of the quaint Spanish-themed Anglo-owned cafes along the square. They tied their horses and started through the marketplace at the square's western corner. As Gatreaux strode, his eye, more from habit than desire, picked out various young women from the crowd. Then he noticed Stephens. He was uarreled his head with such efficiency so as not to miss a single one of these beauties. Gatreaux slackened his stride, that he might walk a step behind the great professor. The man disgusted him, Gatreaux decided-and it had nothing to do with the fact that the young women, many of them pretty senioritas with striking black hair and eyes, were returning his glances.
"Mrs. Stephens" met them at the I, in a floral-patterned dress and black bonnet.
"Emily doesn't usually accompany me on these expeditions, you understand," said Stephens. "But this time I talked her into it. I told her it was her last chance to see the vanishing American frontier."
"You came to see Indians?" said Gatreaux in English, smiling at Emily, his eyes with no glitter.
"Oh, I think that Indians are perfectly divine," said Emily, immediately blushing.
And Gatreaux knew, with the bland omniscience of the world-weary, that she was acutely conscious of her own naivete. She was awkward, but more than just because of her youth. He knew how her own lack of experience pained her, especially when seen in contrast to the twice-her-age professor. He knew that she doubted everything about herself, especially those qualities which were usually described as the powers of her sex: and that this especially was her chain to the bantam cock Stephens. Gatreaux knew all this, and yawned.
Once, a life before, Gatreaux had been a roue lurching with his cane and top hat along the streets of the Montparnasse. He had ambled in a voluptuous serenity. He had been the cause of many an impetuous confession, and under a marble statue nine centuries old had declared his love nine separate times. Bosoms had been revealed him, in their stunning maternal-erotic amplitude under shade trees sparking with flesh-colored light. Life, the great body, had seemed a flawless machine to him then; he did not concern himself with the guts of it; the surface-plush, taciturn, placid, and made too of intangible form-had urged him to ride it onward without travail.
And then began the war, to which he had hastened.
Only after the Armistice had he taken up flying. He did not fly out of love of risk, or of altitude, or of the uarreled sly assumed romantic persona of the pilot, but only to leave the earth. He had come to hate the earth, for the stenches it uarreled, the mud, the rats, the dead, the worms. No countryside, no matter how sumptuously graced with dell and meadow, with copse and pasture, spoke any delight to him now, for he had seen what lay just a few inches beneath it. It was the same with the great cities. He saw them for what they were now-trinkets on a skeleton, desperately arranged to hide the mute reality.
He wanted no more part in the dark facts of his own physical being, or any other's. In the sky over the shock-still deserts of a foreign and stolen land he could be nothing.
In a strange way, it could be said that he was drawn to Emily for the same reason. Her aridity left him without feeling. She did not move him. He felt neither a desire to possess her nor to quash her. Sitting next to her in the I felt like sitting next to no one: and this was infinitely less troubling than sitting next to Stephens.
He noted that whenever Stephens had a grand thought-which he never failed to exclaim in a grand tone suggestive of his position as a Great Man-she would open a notebook and jot it down in its appropriate section-"The Indian Brain", "The Vanished Frontier", "The New Americans," "The Journey of Mankind", or "Random Thoughts of an Ambling Harvard Professor."
He was about to send his arm down through the sand again to find the other face, when he spied the foot and its ankle lipped over the dune's top edge. He lifted himself, leaving bloody hand-crescents, and hurried up the slope.
She was just coming to when he reached her. He determined to wait until she could speak before he tried to move her. While waiting there, he noticed at last the heat burning along his back and neck, and he looked out at the high blue coma of the sky. He watched the sand whispering grain-by-grain from the razor-edged sections of the dune that had remained impervious to the crash.
"You must see if you can move," he said to her.
She blinked. In the coronas of her eyes there stood reflected a tiny likeness of the sky and its one emaciated cloud. There, the sky seemed quaint, something a little Puritan had painted as the backdrop to a portrait-the subject of which had vanished.
"Please, try to-" he began-and she twisted violently and sat up huffing, hands to her chest.
"Try to walk," said Gatreaux. "Crawl."
She held her chest and huffed.
"The sun," said Gatreaux. "We must find shade."
"Professor Stephens," she stated.
"We must find shade," he said.
She swallowed: a clicking rasp. She put up a knee, careful, now, to fold the torn skirt around her to keep it from flying up in the intermittent wind. Tilting, she half-stood.
"This is a national park," he said. "There are likely to be-" he hunted for the English word-"rangers". Then he noticed that she was staring, with pale, parted lips, down the slope to where the faint tracings of blood lay on the temporarily still sand, like ancient hands carved into rock. She wilted, and he steadied her with a grip on her arm.
And suddenly Gatreaux did not want her there. He did not want her there wilting, grieving, wallowing in her shock at finding the skull beneath the skin, exclaiming at the injustice of ever having to find out, choosing to be shocked over and over again, refusing to accept, relishing her own offended humanity.
"Wait here," he told her, and guided her to sit on the side of the dune opposite the crash. Then he went back over and down to the plane. He leaned into the back cockpit, half-full of sand now, and yanked out the seat. Swishing in the sand, more even now cascading over his head, he found his bag of supplies: a canteen filled with water, matches, two salt tablets, a magnifying glass, a flare gun without flares; he recalled with regret how he had lent his flares out to the other pilot, Williams, just last week. He fished out the jar of venison from where it had tumbled through the fuselage back towards the fin. Feeling mindful of impending dangers, he checked the Colt .45 at his belt.
When he returned to where he had left "Mrs. Stephens," he found only a long series of sagging tracks that led down the dune and then up another. He chased along the trail, cantering, into a dune valley almost identical in shape to the one he had just left. There he found her, standing with arms at her sides, silvery blond hair and flowered dress blowing in time with ghost-toned sheets of gypsum.
He took her hand and led her up another dune. He had no thoughts of tenderness, nor of pride in his role of rescuer. He no longer felt on the brink of despising her existence. The wind ran in his ears. Upon his neck and brow, the rude sun reclined. The empty world opened infinitely around him, as though from his blank center.
While spiriting his Breguet out of France, he had had occasion to stop in Algeria. He had considered staying there, hiding himself away in the southernmost reaches of France's African holdings. But then the sight of the tricolor flying over the city had filled him with revulsion. He had known he could not stay there. Before leaving, he had hired a guide to take him to the brink of the great Sahara. It had frightened him, in its immensity-and by comparison this desert was not frightening. And yet, he knew, one still could die here, frightened or not.
From the height, he spied the cave-or what was almost a cave. It was a place where the wind had blown away the sand from around a tangle of deep-going Yucca roots, causing the tangled roots to stand isolated in the form of a short pillar, which in turn had served to funnel the wind against the dune's base so that a great pock had been worn in the compacted sand under the loose integument. He led her there. They knelt in the shade of the pillar. She drank from the canteen and leaned forward on the shaded sand, propping her forehead against her fists.
Gatreaux laid his supplies out before him and sat staring at them several moments. It seemed to him that he had come home. He was back in futility, in desperation, in a bitter terrain, close, so close to death. Paradoxically enough, his sense of comfort in this familiarity caused him to doubt, for just an instant, the dangerous nature of his present circumstances.
His eyes lost focus, probably, he realized, from his having indulged his old habit of reverie, which in the trenches had served him well as a way of escaping to the sky, and he felt himself sway-and caught his hand back upon the crusted ground in the shallow cave. Here, the ground crunched; and so it was to seem to him that it was this crunch-the one noise in the world then-that caused the vicious something to whip out against his face.
He leapt up, as the rattle-less albino snake went side-winding around the pillar. He lifted his pistol. But something froze him. If he had not been beyond fear, beyond humanity, he might have allowed himself to be solaced by the idea that it was only fear, only normal human horror, that kept him from moving. But as it was, he could only believe that it was due to some chemical change in his body, the body over which he would presently be losing control. There was a subtle tingling around his mouth, as though from a poison kiss. With great straining of muscle, he reached up and felt the double-ridged bite along his cheekbone. Touching the bite dislodged more venom; it raced into his blood; it flamed through his heart; he fell.
He saw the rich-umber fields of the Marne. It was the Marne he always saw, not the later battles, which were just a great blur, an endless cannonade. The Marne had been where the first and last shock was registered. Thousands of blue-coated, blue-helmeted scarlet-pantaloned men flooding across fields behind the tricolor, the front ranks falling in line with the nearing sound of machine gun breath. The grotesque dead, his own shattered shoulder. He lay on the infirmary floor again, tossing with fever, certain that a rat was eating through his wound, trying to get at his heart. And suddenly, he found himself in the white desert, which was more sky than desert, and he was sure a great city had once stood here, this sand but the dust of its great monuments, erected to please a gluttonous class. And there, in the distance, over the sand, so much like a great soap carving in which the shadow interior had been revealed with each convex cut, he saw a bright sooty billowing. It soared into Heaven and spoke in the same way God must have spoken to Moses through the burning bush. I am the maker of deserts, the volcano bursting out of the western night! Fall on your knees, O naked soldier! I am the banner which so many Men have died to see flying at last! I shall make white as bone the world of false verdancy! I shall end at last the troubling paradox! To your knees!
Hazily, she appeared before him, a kneeling figure upon a quivering bed of nothingness. He felt, indifferently, her cutting there and then attempting to suck away the poisoned blood.
Spitting.
Binding the throbbing wound in strips of flowered fabric.
With the quick panic of the awakened she lifted a flattened orb, and he felt smooth fire along his lips and down his chin, throat.
He heard her echo-less sob, as though from under water.
She was there, and then gone again. She was there when he himself was there, and he only knew there had been a blackness after she was there again. She did not know him nor know herself. Nor did he know himself nor her. And then there was blackness.
A figure was walking in a deserted world. He was tall, as though he were a soul of molten tin stretched by timeless certitudes. His strides were great gallops-a bachelor's gait.
The figure came nearer and held up its hand. It was John Stephens.
"I have been up to that white mountain-the one the Spaniards call Sierra Blanca," said John Stephens. His eyes were a mild blue. "It took me many years, but I did it. I just started walking. I walked across the dead world, looking for a cloud. I tore my clothes upon the brambles, I drank black rain out of the bells of yucca. Sometimes, I went mad. I ran through the desert in a circling frenzy, my hands in the air. I lay on a boulder, there in the olive-green, sage-scrabble foothills. One day, I awoke and I was no longer myself. The cloud stood over me. I stood and reached up my hands to it. It floated higher and still higher, like a lost carnival balloon. I chased up after it. That is how I attained the mountain. Near the black top, off a ledge, there was a creature inside a cave. It beckoned me. What could I tell it? I went inside, hunched over and going slowly, for I couldn't see anything, not even its eyes. I was afraid it was a beast. The little hairs were standing up along my spine. I felt the creature scurry away from me, deeper into the cave. I called out after it but now it refused to answer me. I thought it must be the brother to the cloud. And then I heard it sobbing. It was sobbing from somewhere far, far down in the cave, as though it had fallen into a pit all the way to the center of the earth. I shuddered. It had occurred to me that I had been the one for which this trap was intended. And now it was appealing to my sympathy. It had fallen into its pit and now it was yelping for my mercy. But what did it expect me to do? I felt great pity for it-I did-but I was powerless. The darkness was utterly black, except for a few flashes in my brain, and I was still afraid of the thing that had coaxed me into the cave, even though it was now helplessly weeping for my assistance. And I was angry, for I had come to the top of the mountain expecting to see great vistas of light and to find the cloud, though I didn't know why I chased the cloud, and instead I had ended up in this odd, echoing prison. The creature went on and on in its cry and I was afraid I was about to become mad again. I was afraid I was going to give in, and just begin dancing, around the fire of the beautiful stranger's heaving chant. But I did not become mad. I just stood there for a long while, trying to weigh my choices. It seemed to me that I must choose between stepping out over the abyss and hoping that the thing was only testing me, that it was just waiting to rise and support me, float me out-or, on the other hand, and this was the risk, to devour me piece by piece, to make the pieces of me a part of its whole. Or, I could turn around, and go back down the mountain. And hope that everything was the same as when I left it. And this is what I did. I turned around. I went back searching for the opening. As soon as I saw it, I opened my mouth in joy and sand flooded in, to the back of my throat."
…She had snapped out of her state of shock as soon as the French pilot had snapped into his. She had crouched there, fists closed, pale eyes wide. She had worried for a long moment about something she had heard once as a girl, about snakes always coming in twos. She had considered leaving him and going for help. How far off could help be? At most, ten, twenty miles. That was nothing-or it sounded like nothing-so long as she was lucky. And then it had seemed to her that she must stay here and see that he got well, and build a signal fire, and wait to be found. How strange that I know these things. How to treat a snakebite, that you must build a signal fire. But they're things everyone knows, aren't they? They even have them in the moving picture shows. She had been kneeling there indecisively when the sky's single free cloud had passed over the sun, causing more a mere pause in the brilliancy than a full shadow; but somehow it had changed everything inside her.
She tilted up now and looked at the sky, where the sun was hidden just behind a crest, like a fiery lunar thing behind a sharp cloud. The day was already leaving. She grabbed at the magnifying glass and groped up the dune.
She noticed now that the dune had a peculiar shell, much like the exoskeleton of an insect, except made only of sand. Wherever she stepped, she punched through the crust to the lower free-flowing sand.
It caused a dull pain in the backs of her eyes to lift them towards the horizon, across the constant white flash, mountainward. She looked to the Organ Pipe range, jagged, near, and then she wheeled and looked to the Sacramentos; there were bruise-purple storms ranging among these peaks. And then she looked to Sierra Blanca, black now in summer, and she shouted at the top of her lungs and with both hands held the glass above her head and flashed it towards that far height. It was where the Mescaleros were, she knew; but it took only another moment for her to see how absurdly desperate a thought it was that they might see her flash, or, even if they did see it, that they would come in time. She looked down and saw that the wind was already smoothing away the edges of her tracks, making them like pillows still indented from the heads of roving sleepwalkers.
She thought with regret how she would have loved the colors of dusk, had the plane made it to the Mescalero village. The sun sat perfectly circular, blood-red, on the mountain-jagged empurpled horizon over the low waves of dunes, all chiaroscuroed scarlet-and-gray in their curvaceous geometry; the dunes, like benign tumors, wore white pajamas of parallel serrated stripes; and with a sudden sense of peace she considered how the universe had revealed its invisible energy patterns here.
It is hard to believe that these patterns have always been around us-in us, she thought. -But here you can see them, all set out so clearly and simply. And even now the dunes were changing, like the bleached pages of a new book being flipped by the wind.
Who was she.
Here in the vast light of the open world, the story of her life seemed even smaller than it usually did to her. She seemed like something she was remembering. She felt that she had stepped out from herself and that she was standing next to who she usually was. She was not "Mrs. Stephens". She was not even Emily Meyers. She had not been raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a white house where her mother was always calling her name in a screechy voice, telling her to mind her sassy self, hitting her with the curling iron. She had never gone out with her father at night, to walk through the city and on out through the suburbs and then out down the paths of the woods by the moonlight, walked beside him as he walked to work off the pain of his lip cancer. She had not kept walking after he was dead, walking beside the mercury-colored moon. She had never been hired by the Professor, a day she still-still? But she was no longer Emily Meyers-regarded as the greatest day of her life. She had never agreed to transcribe his book, nor learnt how to read his illegible handwriting. She had never allowed him to kiss her, to touch her, roll himself down over her and into her, lurching, and she had never moved into his cottage near Harvard nor gone dressed in finery with him to those parties and been laughed at, nor been embarrassed and ashamed among his pinched-faced friends. And she had not agreed to this trip. She had not sat in the train compartment looking out at the passing land with a third glass of lemonade as he told the latest impressionable stranger of his Theories.
She swallowed at the thought of the lemonade; and now when she looked up, she saw that the mountains had become long shadows, and it I to her for the first time that these same were the mountains they had passed over that morning-passed over in a uarre of wind-soaked sunlight and altitude. Then, the mountains had been brown castellations without discernable scars, much like the uarrele the Professor had shown her in Mexico, only broader, dilapidated as the hobos she had seen in the trainyards; closer, the mountains had struck her with their irregularity of texture, and she had realized that, somehow, she had expected them to maintain their featureless, abstract demeanor, she had had every faith that they would prove cut-outs of a sort, beautiful cathedral dreams pasted on the sky. It had not proven so, none of it had proven so. She had seen the terrifying gravel, the pocks, the withered vegetation, and hard upon this little discomfort of mind, heard the snag of the engine and the pilot's admonition not to worry. She had seen the world become more and more filled with unwanted detail, as it rushed up. Strange to think now how it had all started in her before the crash, with her changing view of these mountains. It was a deep comfort to see how they had become shadow mountains now, how they were all her own now. Yet different than they had been on first sight. They lay around her outside of her, too, like beneficent walls. A secret fortification that had always been there, but which she could not recognize except at such a moment, between day and night. She stood entranced, until the first coyotes howled.
She knew little about these strange dogs, except that she pictured them to be like wolves with snapping fangs, swarming down in a pack.
For a moment she stood there, caught between dream and the choice-which she understood now was always a choice-to be part of the kingdom of reality. Though it might make no difference in her fortunes, beyond a few hours.
She noticed at last that she was trembling, and had been trembling, in every part of her, since awaking from the crash.
She dug in the bag and found the flare gun but no flares, and now with the bag clanking against her side she ran towards the downed plane.
As the dark sank in slowly, a blue gray here, she rummaged in the back cockpit, in hopes of finding the flares; and like him before she found nothing. And so she turned and, like him before, began to dig.
With a straight-edged hand she smoothed away the first layer.
Another layer sped like a wave to a non-existent shore.
Her hands groped through to a cold, congealed mass, and very quietly, she cleaned the face.
Black as a three thousand-year-old mummy, he poked from the sand into the last of light. The sands had kept him cool in the summer heat, and there was only the iron smell of blood and brain. It occurred to her that his own body was the dark cloud he had been seeking. He was a statue-a monument to some great happening which no longer stirred the heart.
He was so changed-and perhaps it was also that she was still in shock, or perhaps it was only that she was following these events through as one follows a dream and that until she awoke she could not really feel any grief though she might feel an undifferentiated emotion uarreled at her throat or even fall to sobbing-but it seemed to her she felt no grief for him; and she felt no horror but the creeping horror, which rose and fell, a horror at what her life had been until now.
Breathing hard from the effort, she dug to his groin, so oddly familiar, like an ogre from a fable, to his toes, and here dared to light matches to seek the flares. There was an empty wine bottle. Another. A peeled tin. Soda cracker crumbs. An old French magazine. And a funny trinket, in the shape of a cross, with an inscription-- Pour La Courage, au Marne, Novembre, 1914-she threw it out over the sands in a gesture of frustration.
She returned to the Frenchman, freed the Colt .45 from his grip. The sandy wind was already starting to bury him, piling into his crevices and along the latitudes of his body. Like shrunken carcasses of snowflakes, the sand sifted and settled. She felt his wrist. It seemed she could discern some faint pulse there. She tried again. It seemed to her that the pulse must be her own.
She ate a scrap of the venison, drank a sip of water. She labored up the dune.
It was fully night now. There was a smell like sex in the air. The coyotes were quiet, but she could feel them padding towards her over the sand as though it were her very skin.
She slid back down and hooked the Frenchman under the arms, and now without warning a spasm of horror and grief rose weakeningly in her chest. The weight of his body-it was like the weight of his body as he pressed down into her, his panting meat-colored face wedged in warmly into the soft angle between her shoulder and throat-she didn't mind it, she told herself from habit even now, he was a great man, everyone was always saying so-he was a famous man, a man with a place in History, and what was she, what was any story she could have, next to his or all the new previously unheard-of stories he was bringing into his Civilized World?-and she leaned back, tugging hard as he dangled like a rag doll, the tears squirting from her hard-shut eyes, like the drool from his mouth.
After an hour, she had pulled him to the plane. She propped him against the side.
She stood for a time resting. She listened to her heavy breath as though to the breath of an invisible creature. She noticed that she no longer trembled, though the wind ran through her hair and the shreds of her dress. She felt the order of her body; she felt the weight of inner patterns. It occurred to her that this was how trees must feel.
She was lifting the pilot's wrist, to try his pulse again, when a strange frustration, a weariness, overcame her. She dropped the wrist. She did not need that uncertainty, no, she did not need it. She did not need to sit wondering, she needed to act, no matter what that action might be. And there was something else. She did not want to feel that pulse again because whether it was his pulse or her own, it made her nervous. She was loathe to be reminded that her life had a mechanical diminsion, which like the engine of the plane could be halted.
Then, for a moment, she felt bored with her own fate, cold to the living cadaver of herself. She felt how she was even now quietly becoming forever, from her every instantaneous pore. She, like the air, turning thin as intellect.
She spelunked again in the back cockpit and found the can. She popped the cork and heaved the gasoline out over the wings, the fuselage, the human faces.
She lit the match.
After the explosion, she stood upon a dune as the plane burned on. With each wind, gas-soaked gypsum grains rolled up glowing into the sky and then fell, stippling an unknown, softly shifting wave. Loyal now only to death, she kept watch over the pyre, her flesh drawn to its delicious sooting radiance.
All around her, like an opened fruit of tender, illicit seeds, the desert lay silvered with moonlight. There were wide weak-shadowed curves among the dunes, and seen at a distance they made the land look dappled as the sea when, amid a storm, there is a break in the clouds far out near the horizon. The sky was cloudless, pitch, clear as venom, the moon and stars visible-absolute.
But she saw none of this, standing within the halo of the little inferno.
She felt that she had at last done some great, terrible thing, and that now it did not matter what became of her.
She concentrated on the next breath, swallow, blink.
THE END
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