You are home one night when the shaking begins. You shove on your slippers to investigate but remember that there is no shaking in the desert. The shaking must be internal. You check internal. There is no shaking.
Afterwards you consult the Rye Guy. “There was this night,” you explain, “where everything was shaking.”
“Everything?” Asks the Rye Guy. He has eaten a helium balloon and flops around like one of those guardian angels you see outside of car dealerships. “No,” you say, “not everything. I wouldn’t know if everything was shaking, because. If everything was shaking there would be no way to discover if there was shaking.”
“We are rocketing through the blackness of blackness of space at nearly thirty-four thousand kilometers,” muses the Rye Guy. The Rye Guy is goofy and his voice is wheedling, skinning a needle. You agree wholeheartedly. “And we don’t notice that. Because we are all doing it.”
You understood your intentions and are of sound mind. So you are surprised when he does not find this dissatisfying like you do—secretly, you hoped he would join you. But you don’t blame him. You live in dissatisfying and it is one of the worst things in the world. You huff out bubbles to state your objection. In them, the Rye Guy’s smile is enormous and diagonal.
All that is in the past now and you have crossed the past’s boundaries at some point on the drive to Lakeview. You ask the Rye Guy how long ago it has been since you discovered the shaking. He laughs and asks when you were born. You both laugh and laugh and laugh and rev through a road of smooth bones. The ground that you are driving on is angry at being oppressed. There are buttes that curve upwards and devour. From shotgun, the Rye Guy blows in the sand.
“Why is it,” asks the Rye Guy, “that when you’re rummaging around in the desert? You know? The desert? Why is that when you’re rummaging around in the desert, and you’re out of knapsacks and salty crackers, why is it that you see the cow’s skull? Haven't you ever considered, while rummaging around in the desert, what happens to the rest of the cow? Why the cow is the only animal to die? Haven't you wondered that while rummaging around in the desert?”
His voice is like an ant bite. At your feet, there is a whole hill of red ants and they have helped themselves to the insides of your slacks. You roll in cylinders to get them off your ass. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. You are both torching time, and you wonder how you started burning time without thinking. You wonder how you started burning time. You ask the Rye Guy about the minimum sentence attached to arson. “I don’t really care about the desert,” says the Rye Guy. “This time is cooked,” says the Rye Guy. “We should drive and laugh.”
You and the Rye Guy encounter Girlfriend. She is not your Girlfriend. She is not the Rye Guy’s Girlfriend either, although if the chasm between them is vast it is far less vast than the chasm between the two of you. You encounter her in a coffee shop full of talking anthropomorphs. When she grins, her mouth turns her face inside out and her teeth are a row of pikes.
Certainly, you would never greet her in a phalanx, but at the head of a large column like an old friend or brother or something like that. Such is only courteous and expected by a polite society.
You are curious why she has chosen this place. You are curious what this place is. You are curious why she burns everything around her. But put simply you find that you are not that curious.
Girlfriend’s glass of Dr. Pepper stinks of Dr. Pepper and she pours some of it down your gullet. When she glimpses the Rye Guy, she folds him in half and swings him against her side.
“Once I was in a fight,” she explains. “It was a real fight. A fight for the right. A fight with the might. And there was no room for error. We were between two cow femurs. It was in the desert.”
You wave your hands and hiss. Girlfriend strikes you in the nose. You fold and shrink, which is greatly amusing to the Rye Guy. “We were between thirteen sheep femurs arrayed circular. Arrayed circular, like an arena. Have you ever been in an arena? And it was a fight.”
“A real fight," says the Rye Guy. He is awestruck. “A fight for the right. A fight with the might.”
“And there was no room for error,” says Girlfriend solemnly.
The Rye Guy likes you being in the same place and shakes his mane. But same place is bad. You do not know why you signed on for such a long contract and long to grow bird wings that can vine-flower out of same place. If you were in the desert, Would you feel this cold?
You prod her further. But she does not hear you and is very clear that what she explains next is of her own accord. She is not speaking because of your pleas. “It was life or death and despite the foul filthy traitors weakening us—” there are too many thunderclouds for you to decipher her next words, but they pass over quickly. Rain and thunderclouds go with each other, with rain not requiring thunderclouds but thunderclouds requiring rain. There is no rain in the desert, you know. There are no thunderclouds in the desert, only in the recesses of impoverished buildings constructed by enslavers during the Gilded Age. You wish you felt Gilded.
“I was very fast,” says Girlfriend. “Like a plane.” She zooms around. She zooms around like a plane. “I hit him in the head. His head exploded.” The Rye Guy’s head explodes. The three of you laugh for a long time. You laugh so hard that you put your hands on your bellies, the way those people who are good at pretending to be happy do.
“We kept at it,” Girlfriend continues. “Kept the pressure up. Kept working. Kept working hard. And we hit very hard, too. Hit hard and fast. Hit straight in the head. Hit in the skull. Killed them very hard.”
This is becoming immensely displeasing to you. Girlfriend grabs you and the Rye Guy by the scruff of your necks and carries you outside. You are grumbling about the check. She did not pick it up, but you do not entirely remember being given the chance to do it yourself. This coffee shop will vanish under the rock and sand waves but until then you are its public enemies number one two and three if you cannot catch that check before it uses its head start to run away.
But come to think about it, you aren’t really sure you want to. Would you be one, two, or three?
“When we beat each other,” says the Rye Guy, “one of the things we are quickest to discover is that there’s nothing underneath. Like when you have a copper wire, and you whip it around a cow skull in the desert. The wires don’t shatter.” “Or for instance,” says Girlfriend, “when I’m beaten, I don’t have bones that could shatter. Only ones that have eradicated shattering like the Bubonic Plague or my last couple doctors, churches, and families.”
The shaking is very far in the distance. It is like you are racing increasingly vertically, and the more vertically you race, the more likely you are to peel off and fall. And you are glad that the shaking is far away. The three of you pile into a dirty and massive truck that you know you are too stupid and weak to drive and vroom through a road whose borders are marked by the bones of cattle. You know there are a lot of bones in a cow and are certain the skull to bone ratio should be higher. You don’t think they die in cyclone formation, either.
There are houses in tarps that you pass. They are gumdrops and the people in them are goblins. The closer you come the more you can see the curvature of the earth devouring them. Pointing and jumping in his seat, the Rye Guy talks about tarps versus back home. “A nickel,” he says. “Not just one, either, but the whole row of them. All for just one or two nickels.”
You wish you had nickels, even just one or two. If you spoke up now for the first time in an eon, if just one or two, you would be as sick as a god. If you were sick as a god, you would become a god. You stare away from the road and into a cow carcass with the bones of other animals grafted on its back and hooves. You wonder when at last you will become a god.
“Did you know,” says the Rye Guy, pouring a thermos of boiling hot, steaming coffee right over his lap, “that if you pour a thermos of boiling hot, steaming coffee right over your lap, in a truck like this, a truck that is driving at full speed, like this truck here, that the coffee that you are pouring, in this truck here, driving at full speed in the middle of the desert, that coffee is hurtling through the desert at the exact same speed that this truck is hurtling through it?”
Who said anything about coffee? You sure didn’t. You can’t remember pouring anything without spilling, either. You're certain that if you hadn’t inflicted third degree burns on yourself that you would remember the occasion. “That’s why it doesn’t fall,” explains the Rye Guy, “and gives you horrible burns that would shoot your veins with liquid blood and fear.”
“It doesn’t fall,” says Girlfriend. “After all, how can it fall when I can’t fall? I can’t fall, you know.”
“It doesn’t fall,” says the Rye Guy, reverently. “How can it? You can’t fall. Nothing can fall.”
The three of you stop at a gas station. There is one pump that warns you not to touch it and no real people in sight. The tarps are scarecrows, but only on good days, and they have good days and bad days. The tarps are having a bad day and it is half past time to get back to driving.
Girlfriend drifts away. She is a big tree in a big storm, a little tree in a little storm. She is sand in her own fingers. The Rye Guy incomprehensibly stretches to accommodate. The desert beyond has become red and craggy. You cannot focus on the muddle in the sky and have lost track of so many mountain ranges. When you check your pockets for the mountain ranges your pockets blow up. You wish you could cry through your eyes rather than your nose or teeth.
“A desert cannot eat,” says Girlfriend. She has her arms extended in a T and is maneuvering, like she is playing fighter plane. “A desert cannot eat because it has no teeth.”
The Rye Guy is fascinated. He has become short and this also makes you want to cry. “A desert can’t cry, either. It is a desert. All the desert can do is,” he loses his train of thought mid sentence and you scramble from many meters away to try and locate it. And you find that is a fruitless effort.
Now you are maneuvering like a combat plane as well, spinning frustratingly far away from
both of them. “Rocks in the ground,” says the Rye Guy. He turns to you. “Rocks in the
ground like big piles of cheese.”
Girlfriend shakes her head and is suddenly very close. Her breath reeks of Dr. Pepper. “Rocks in the ground like big mounds of candy, crumbling and crunching, rolling and roiling.”
They should be under you. This is what you think as you hike your pants up. The rocks should be interlocking like four dimensional gears and they should be swallowing. You can fold the Rye Guy easily even if you cannot hold the Rye Guy easily. With Girlfriend you choose another tack. With Girlfriend you make yourself very big like a bear in order to get your way.
It is so cold and the truck is so far away. You hold both of them under your arms and fly through the rocks. When you encounter the first cow skull you’ve seen in seconds you stomp on it. It has horns but it doesn’t poke. It is brittle but doesn’t break. Neither the Rye Guy nor Girlfriend say a word to you. You wish they were heavier. You wish you could remember what it felt like when that cow skull that you stomped on made you afraid and fresh.
The truck has meandered and stepping towards it is like racing a galaxy. You know it shouldn’t be this hard.
There is no slipping the keys into the ignition. Nobody has heard of slipping the keys into the ignition nor or ever, in the desert or the other places you’ve heard of. Slipping the keys into the ignition is dead because nobody talks about slipping the keys into the ignitions. “You couldn’t slip,” says Girlfriend into the Rye Guy’s face, “you couldn’t slip if slipping was taught in a four-year undergraduate program with a full-ride scholarship for balloon people like you.” Then she clarifies. Now the truck is racing again. “I am not talking to you.”
It is many years when you climb a plateau filled with people. Not buildings or bathrooms or storage units, just people stacked into each other. Like shuffling cards. Interchangeable and intertwined, bouncing at the sleight of hand. You are very drowsy.
The road is now all bones and they are very smooth. When you get frustrated and stomp on the gas, nothing speeds up. Millions of bubble people bounce against your windshield. They are tiny. Nothing you do impacts the frequency they laugh at you. You cannot think of words to describe the emotion this makes you feel. Then you find you cannot say them, either.
When you turn around, you lose track of your limbs. The Rye Guy and Girlfriend are in the passenger seat having sexual relations. You stare into the back of his skull and you can hear yourself like bubbles in the abyss. “Why are there so many?” The sentence is so short. It cuts you. “Cow skulls in the desert—why would there ever be so many of anything so easily recorded?”
Girlfriend stares through the Rye Guy. She makes a choice to carefully interject. “You,” she carefully interjects, “are just biased. Of course in the course of your life you’ve seen only cow skulls in the desert. You've only lived. So you only have the one perspective. You've never died, like I have.”
You meditate on this. “I’ve died,” says the Rye Guy. “I died back in dissatisfying and nothing has ever been different since. Why didn’t you retrieve me back in the desert when you had all the chances in the world—chances that grew off trees? Tiny trees that were a nickel a piece?”
You squint and don’t see any cow skulls, which means you have ascended, transcended, descended to some penultimate hour that’s not night and isn’t day or week or month or year.
But when you try to reveal this, words do not come out. You were spent to the dregs waiting for the other shoe to drop and this yellow bird in the desert to stop singing about dead cattle and other dead things. They don’t hear you. They don’t see you. The Rye Guy does not see you. The Rye Guy has no eyes, but he sees himself. The crowds become sparse. You are still driving a massive truck that you are too stupid and weak to handle through a mountain—an ocean—of cow skulls. They grind under the truck’s treads like so much candy.
Evan Chapin is nineteen years old, an undergraduate senior, and a new writer with a passion for experimental fiction.