Samantha Buckley
The Desert Spring
Everywhere I walk, where people have been, there is something written for the eyes of another person.
Asha glanced up from her journal. The sun was white hot, bleaching the horizon and baking the pavement. She knew that it would have been smarter to travel at night, but she was determined to get to water. Her bottle was halfway gone, and her only hope was to get away from the cement death trap. The wars and droughts had torn apart these strongholds, and their inhabitants had sucked them dry of safety and sustenance. There was nothing left for Asha save the worn signs that led her forward.
Sometimes Asha pretended that ghosts whispered those words to her: Main Street, University to the right, I-80 Exit towards Sacramento, CA. Her toes would catch on a section of crumbling gravel and the long gone shop keepers would call out, “Free Wi-Fi, come on in!” or, “Home churned Ice Cream, new flavors in today.” Or the signs would creak in a burst of wind, and Asha would hear them say, “Just three more miles.”
The voices weren’t real, though, and she knew that. Sometimes Asha wished that she actually was crazy and believed in the ghosts. Maybe then she wouldn’t feel the quiet so distinctly. Asha had felt the silence of solidarity for a long time, even before Taja passed. She had been lonely enough to hope for ghosts and voices.
Asha knew that there was no such thing as ghosts, otherwise she would have run in to one that she knew by now: her parents, or her neighbors, or anyone that had passed in the second plague. She and Taja had been the only ones to make it out without black veins and bloody pores.
Then, of course, there was Asha’s friend Taja. The girl cut her ankle when they were crossing that sludge river in Colorado. The infection played Hydra with her until Taja’s leg was decorated with a hundred-headed snake. Now it was just Asha. Just Asha and a world with gathering dust over dry lakes and battle fields.
Asha bent down to pick up a fallen sign. It was yellowed and rough, streaked with white bird excrement. A wind wove around her neck and fondled loose tendrils, its scraping sound in her eardrums causing the sign to breathe. It told her to read. She rubbed her finger pads raw against the metal as bits of rust and powdery shit flaked off.
Natural Hot Springs. 3 Miles West.
#
I understand that we are a species that leaves the past through death. We live in a way until there is death, and then we move on. But I can only find death.
The sky started to shift into a darker pallet, the blues turning towards violet.
Asha’s feet broke through the frayed scales of dirt. The ground had been baking under the heat for so long that it had turned fragile, stamped easily and with as little as a pair of swine skin moccasins and one hundred and ten pounds of hungry girl. Her trail of steps reached for two miles, but Asha had already lost sight of the city; the signs had taken her along a dirt road through the canyons, recognizable only by its flat, carved surface and the reassurance of another sign every so often. It was long walk in the desert for someone running out of water. Asha had to hope that she would get it, or she might not make it to another town. Hoping wasn’t exactly in her nature, but it was in her name.
“Asha,” her mother used to say, “be proud. Your name has traveled a long way to get here to you. Remember your gran? ‘Your name reaches across the ocean, Asha, it stands for life, hope, desire. If you can’t follow anything, sweet girl, follow that, follow yourself.’”
Her lips moved in memory of those last words.
It was strange, Asha thought, that the desolation would feel so natural here. Empty space and ragged scrubs fanned out on either side of her. The quiet was alive in the dust. It whipped, defiant. Asha’s fingers found their way to her throat, touching lightly.
The desert needed a lot less water than she did. She pressed on.
A crow called out above her, and her eyes found it. The carrion bird flew in front of the setting sun with its dark body, making it look like a winged shadow haloed in gold light. It flew behind a rock out-cropping and she saw a shape move.
Almost as soon as she had seen it, the shape was gone. It looked tall, but most likely it was a wild dog. They came nearer to her than any other animal. Asha supposed that they were still confused about the separation. Her mother told her that dogs used to be pets and live in people’s homes. Humanity’s domestication was a hard imprint to shake. The few dogs that had neared Asha had seemed as confused as she, unsure about whether they wanted the stroke of her flesh or the taste of it more.
More shadows curved above her as the canyon narrowed into a mostly covered pathway. The crack of a ceiling lit her way as forged her path. She almost stepped onto an existing footprint in front of her and froze.
“Hello?” Her voice ached as she scratched it out. These were not whispers for a ghost.
Asha kicked up dust as her feet sped into a jog. “Hello? Is there anyone left? Hello?” The path led into a bowl-like room and there, at one end, stood a young man. She stopped in the middle of the room and watched his wary face. Her lips parted and she felt a strain in her jaw as subtle tremors ran across her lower lip.
He moved closer, feet kept close to the ground and hesitant. “You’re here. How did you…?”
“The signs. I didn’t think anyone was left.”
“There was a man a while ago, but… No one else…well. You, you’re here.”
“Hello,” she said again. Her lips spread into a small, timid smile.
He walked closer. His mouth responded to hers, cheeks twitching around his own smile.
#
The water here is like a mother’s milk. I feel the ache inside of me.
The young man’s name was Dezi. Asha sat with him around the hot spring. The mineral water leaked moisture and nutrients to the chapped earth at its edges. She placed her feet within it and felt the bubbles from deep under the surface float up to tickle the creases between her toes. The water was warm, too warm to be refreshing in the desert afternoon, but it was a miracle; it painted a coat of condensation over the cave walls, which glittered in the light from cracks in the cave.
Asha looked at Dezi. His deep, brown skin shone in the water’s reflected light. Here was this boy, with eyes the color of sand, and Asha felt like she had all of the time in the world.
It had been a week since she encountered him. They gathered cactus fruit and nopales, dried hog meat, and drank from the spring. The cave was warm and sleepy. Asha had never felt so safe in the world, had never felt like such a natural part of it. She rubbed the rust out of her throat with words, in the same way she searched for them on her metal signs.
“My mother used to tell me stories about Desert Springs,” Asha said.
“Hmm?”
“She said that they were magical. Deserts are so lifeless, you know? I had always wanted to avoid them. She used to say that they had more secrets than green forests, and the sweetest places to stop. They defied everything, could be hopeful even after the wars, she was sure of it.”
Dezi nodded. “I grew up in the desert, but not this one. My father told me to stay in the sand, even after the droughts. He hid in them during the bombing. In the canyons.” Dezi looked at her. “I’ve seen the ground soak up blood and sand down crater edges. Life never stops here, it’s too rough already. It is good, though: it forces you to pull yourself together and it’s not a cold place. It has kept me going, and it gave me hope. It brought you here.”
Asha laughed out loud, the breath liberated from her lungs. Yes, the desert had given him Hope.
The sound made Dezi smile and he scooted closer. “Why are you laughing?”
“I’m Hope,” Asha said. The smile didn’t leave his face, but Dezi’s brows twitched over questioning eyes. She said, “That’s Asha means: hope, life…desire.”
“Desire,” Dezi repeated.
She cleared her throat and stared into the murky, green spring. “I spent a year in a library, before I came here. It wasn’t smart, and I was hungry all the time. It didn’t seem like a good place for a human to be. I knew all that, but with Taja gone I didn’t feel that human anymore.”
Dezi watched her face, and Asha took comfort from something that she had missed for a long time: human eyes staring back at her.
“It was selfish, I think. I felt so small, like there was this larger conversation happening and I couldn’t hear any more human voices. I couldn’t hear my voice. It felt like I was the last, and… I wanted to know what it meant to be one of the last humans on earth. I wanted to know what it meant to be human. I read book after book and I tried to find something of myself in them, in humanity. I wanted to be a person and not just the last body to fall down.”
“You’re not the last human, Asha. I’m here, too.” His fingers coaxed her chin toward him. “There could be others, but even if there aren’t, you know that we don’t have to be the last.”
That was something that Asha had not dared to consider before this moment. Asha had considered surviving and dying. She hoped for a long life, sometimes, and for safety. She felt the ache of hunger, but this was something entirely different.
The trickling spring lulled her brain into a warm feeling of safety and whispered a suggestion of longing. Dezi’s warm, rough fingers on her face made an ache bloom in her chest for human contact. Ghost whispers dissipated next to a solid human voice, and he was solid and warm and real. Asha had been alone for so long that she had forgotten how comforting it was to reach out and touch another human being. Dezi offered more than that comfort. Could she take it?
Asha’s fingers traced the lines at the corners of his eyes from looking into the bright sun. He offered an invisible could-be future. Could they find a tangible connection to humanity in each other; could they start again in a desert spring? Asha wondered.
The desert had survived for so long; why couldn’t they?
#
I felt the poison in my throat. Words could not tempt a cure.
Asha slept in Dezi’s arms during the night. His even breaths had lulled her to sleep. In the morning, however, it was his screams that woke her up.
He thrashed his leg and thrust Asha out of the embrace. Asha dragged herself backwards as he screamed, her eyes wide and darting. Her gaze landed on a long, heavy shape that whipped back and forth on Dezi’s shin. Asha’s breath inflated a bubble of fear in her chest as she watched the dusty brown snake. For a moment, she could only stare. When Dezi’s screams echoed on the walls around her, a white-hot rage ground itself into the pit of her stomach; she rushed forward, hands grabbing for flint splinter as large as her fist. Her hands blurred in front of her and slammed the sharp edge into the snake’s neck again, and again, and again as she painted her hands with its blood. Its decapitated body went limp, and Asha pried the maw from Dezi’s leg.
Dezi also let himself go limp. She heard a gust of air leave his lungs as he collapsed on his back, and she listened as that gust transformed into sobs from the relief and the pain. Asha lowered her mouth to the wound to suck the poison out.
The venom hit her tongue like biting laughter, dancing on her taste buds and mocking her naiveté. Each time Asha turned to spit, she felt a new understanding weigh more heavily on her. She thought back to Dezi’s offer and his warmth. She thought about a future made of sucking poison out of a wound.
Asha and Dezi could be the last two people in their world, and they had to make this horrible choice. It meant that they had to know too much. They would make brothers and sisters who would have to make more brothers and sisters to survive. They would make a tree of heartbreak that grew at a rotten core. Force children to play a game of incest when they knew that they wouldn’t make it to a third generation. Both Asha and Dezi knew what it meant to straddle the edge of survival. The spring gurgled like a baby around her, and she hated it.
Asha had thought that the desert spring was a miracle, but Dezi had been closer to the truth. The spring, like the desert, was hard and resilient; it did not understand mortality, but Asha had to.
She could still taste the last of the venom on her tongue when she lifted her head to gaze at Dezi. “I have to go.”
“No!” He struggle to sit up and face her, grimacing when his leg moved with him. “Don’t leave. We could still—”
“We could still what? We are at the end of our line. What could we give children except a burden? Let them carry out humanity’s death themselves on their shoulders, simply because we couldn’t bear it on our own? Even if we aren’t the last, we don’t belong here.” She pushed herself up on shaking legs.
“Asha!” Dezi could not get up and chase her. No matter how shaky her legs seemed, they would take her away and he could not follow.
“No,” Asha’s voice soft and calm. It didn’t shake the walls like Dezi’s did, but it shook him. His hands tightened into fists and his straining knuckles shone white in the shifting light off of the water.
“No,” Dezi said. He bared his teeth in a grimace. His fists turned from stone to dirt, and she watched as he crumpled into himself before turning away.
Asha couldn’t stay in the spring with Dezi. Humanity didn’t fit here anymore. It had wound its life around the earth tightly, but the desert would break it. It was only a matter of time. For so long, Asha had gripped hard to the humanity that seemed to surround her, but it was only dust in a library. That life was done, and so were they. There would be no more poison to suck out.
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