Nocturn

We only moved at night. Starlit. They say there was a time when the stars would hide, that they were ashamed of the humans, ashamed of how we gave up on them, how we built and built and built into the sky until all the burning flames of our hubris turned everything gray. They say, at the end, the day and night looked the same. You could only tell by the heat. I couldn't imagine something hotter than this, but that's what they say...

When the sun rose high enough to make shade under your brim, we would shelter in the wreckage or the low trees. Trees seemed to grow up from everything, in precisely the places you'd bet against them. Maybe they were betting against us too. It was hard to believe we were winning that gamble. Someone would always stay up through the heat, which was never too hard. I think we all wanted to sleep when it cooled, when the flies would settle and the rumble would too.

Years ago we'd wander near, or on, the streets. By the time the sun poked low and scorched our eyes, it would be time to move, and by the time we had progressed a few measures, the black lava would have settled. We moved quickly those nights, until we learned that speed didn't promise safety. Geryl, Homnith, and Urlock spent day 8951 dodging through a jam trap on road 67. We knew the jams were dangerous. Anyone could be tucked between the metal and you wouldn't see them until they could see your soul. The rest of us spent the evening hillside—recovering, preparing for a dark tumble to a new future—with one watch. We didn't need the watch to hear the screams. We didn't need the watch to tell us that we wouldn't be taking roads anymore. We didn’t talk that night, agreed to travel on, aimless. That night, the stars watched silent tears evaporate at our heels as we became Drifters.

I never liked those jams anyways. They stretched for hundreds of measures, stretched longer than the night could shine. Not that the sand was any better: slow and unending, changeless. You could kick a mound of for a hundred days and it would look the same. You could walk another hundred and it would feel like you had just begun. But you'd know you kicked, or walked, because your feet would be branded by that hundred, blistered like an exposed lower lip.

"How you know izss better? They down here too. Someone have found it now." Sara was too young to remember how things changed, how the seasons left, how hastily people forgot about their well manicured lives. How some lost themselves—mutated—became what they thought was necessary. We all knew they were waiting for an excuse to become the lurking monster inside.

"I doubt they would be advertising if they did." Jove grunted out a cough. Even through the bundles you could sense his bulk. You could see it in his wide ebony eyes. You could hear it in his shuffle. He hunched broad over a nine inch blade, carving new finger-grooves into a gunstock. They looked like toys under his grip.

"Mmmm, I thinkn... is not where we goin." Sara mused.

"For today, we have our eyes, and only to believe what we can see." Jove had been day-watch, had sat with thoughts, watching the wind tickle the tips of countless piles of sand.

"So we gotta go, to see!" Sara jumped into runner's stance, with that shit eating grin, with a joy the world hadn't seen in nearly 10,000 days.

"Someone's gotta." Jove straightened, letting the sun droop into his eyeline.

"I think izss better."

"Me too." Jove's confidence trickled into the approaching dark.

The group rustled. I was already up. Something in me stirred restless, disturbed when the sun had thrown its final colors, begging me to hide from the world. The mind knew this new life was necessary. The memories of the old didn't fade during shuteye. I tried to think back to the times when daylight was our friend. Everything seemed so shuffled in there. I would take hold of a moment just to watch it fizzle into the reality ahead of me, as if the same thing that warned me of the night was also telling me to let it go. But it was impossible today to listen to that calling. We all had to change.

I will always remember the day when the word family changed. I remember father's eyes, how they changed, how the man we thought he was left. That day, my mother saw it too. Back then, we'd call it panic. What happened next... the word panic changed too. The look in my father's eyes wasn't a memory that fizzled, it was one that replayed. I saw that look in a thousand strangers' eyes. He became one of the lost. My mother knew we had to leave. He didn't speak; he didn't even watch us go.

Despite reliving my waking nightmare every night, there was a peace beyond the fear. The crisp air pretended to whisper freshness, and the stars danced a calm melody into our march. We, like most of the pilgrims, believed there was a place to go. The truth of that didn't matter to me. I had to believe in something. It wasn't too reassuring that everyone described it differently, that the thirsty preached of cool waterfalls, the hungry of cornucopia. The broken, they mostly followed. Yet no matter how feeble, everyone had a special wish to cast. I began taking down the wishes on pages between withered leather. Some nights I wished I could draw it, could craft an image for others to hope upon. I tried to, dig for lines in my mind. My imagination fizzled too. Everything was blurry at night.

One thing we shared, that we didn't need a drawing for, something we knew with the certainty of grating sand between our toes: we had to keep walking, towards something. This place was not a place of rest. And even if it wasn't how we imagined, didn't have all we desired... any place had to be better than The Drifts.