White Mesa, or The Metamorphoses: Flash Fiction
I don’t know if it was a dream, she said. I can’t remember if it was a dream
She was unsettled by the otherworldly horizon of sand that surrounded their new home, the mountains which, shadowed by clouds, looked black in the distance. The house stood blithely at the edge of the desert, little more than a dry thistle protruding from the sand. Her older brother would take the truck in the evenings and go off into town while she stayed at home with their parents, and would always come back late, the screen door banging behind him. Under the broad-faced moon and dazzling stars the night was as lucid as day, and the detritus of the desert, its shriveled flora and withered fauna, rose about her. The heaving creature, its slick skin pitch black, its wings trembling, its limbs thin as bone, squeezed from its body a skeletal offspring covered in slime, and then another, and then another, and they began to shiver and unfold themselves. It turned and looked at her. Her hands were in her mother’s, which possessed already a slight tremor. I don’t know if it was a dream, she said. I can’t remember if it was a dream.
Her brother, his arm around the girl, had taken to the town like a fish to water and she envied him for it. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something scurry around the corner of the adobe building. In the shadow of the searing sun the creature twitched and stared back at her, and she screamed and ran and it was her brother who caught her in his arms. I won’t leave the house anymore, she said to her father, tears and spittle on her lips. I want to go back! I want to go back! Mom, they’re real, they’re real, she pleaded.
She had slept through the rest of the day fitfully and awoke in the dark evening with her head pounding. As she approached from the hallway the lamplight glowed on the wooden floor and there was the sound of scuttling legs. When she rounded the corner, three of the creatures, perched about the living room, stopped their tittering and turned to look at her and became very still. Through the evening she could her them crawling all over the house, the walls, her locked door. There had been something unmistakably human about them.
In the middle of the night she emerged, the house dark and still. Looking into her parents’ room she saw that one of the creatures was sleeping in their bed. She lowered herself beside it and lied there until the pounding of her heart and convulsion of her muscles had calmed as much as they ever would. Then turning on her side she extended an arm about the creature and embraced it.
