Bedrock
A Short Story
On a patch of grass in the middle of the desert is a woman. By day, she tends to her garden of wildflowers, shoveling the shallow dirt through to the moist sand. She gets the seeds imported from every kind of climate and delivered by camel and sometimes, she can’t even believe that’s possible. And maybe it isn’t. Maybe she wanders her property-demarcated by four corners of cactuses — and finds small pebbles to plant in her patch of grass, tending them until they grow ornate rock formations. Or, maybe she sits in the middle of a blank, scorching desert, burning in even hotter sand dunes, watching her arms roast and bubble and char until they too become sand that drifts into the ever intensifying winds.
Who’s to say? Certainly not the woman.
When evening comes, she lies in her shack, insulated from dust storms and the cold. Most likely, she’s coated the shack in a protective seal of some kind, but it’s also possible that there isn’t a shack at all but rather a dug-out cave. This she has smoothed with water from the aquifer that rests just at the bottom of a grand staircase she’s constructed from the cave. It’s more like an underground pool, and this is where she bathes, by the ethereal bluish glow of a thousand bioluminescent creatures.
Or, maybe she sleeps in a crudely constructed grave, complete with a headstone and pulley system…
