I hope this won’t change anything, he said.
She thought about it for a moment. No, she said. It won’t change anything. And it wasn’t a lie, not even a little bit, because the status quo had ignited hours before—all that was left of it was embers and ash.
We probably should have started this earlier, she said. We wasted all that time.
Things happen when they’re meant to, he said. Things happen when they should.
“If you see a guy’s a bad tipper, or he doesn’t tip, it’s a red flag,” he said. “That guy will lie to you and cheat on you and never do anything good.”
“I’ve got some experience with that,” I said. “I wish I’d paid more attention to that from the start.”
The bike riders approached us as we walked down the dusty street, just enough space between them to indicate they might not know each other, though they rode parallel and at matched pace.
The woman introduced herself across the gap, then held out her hand.
“You can call me Axel,” said the man as their bikes floated past us. I turned and watched as he reached across the space, took her hand, and held it while they rode away.
I approached from behind while he stood engrossed in the monument. I skirted him in the dark and climbed the ladder to the top of the structure, then looked down at his head.
“Oh, hello,” he said. “I thought I heard someone jingling around me.”
The belly dancing scarves made me a poor stalker.
“I hope I didn’t startle you,” I said.
“Not at all,” he said. “You’re just in time to hear my sentence.”
“You might find just what you’re looking for up there,” said the blanket-wrapped man at the foot of the 60-foot ladder.
I looked toward the crow’s nest atop the dome. “I’m most worried about getting back down.”
“You’ll get cold eventually,” he said.
It only took 13 rungs before my confidence wavered as hard as the ladder rocked. “I can’t do it,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I looked down and realized he’d come over to hold the ladder still. He released it and shrugged.
“Do what you have to do,” he said. “It’s your loss.”
We tired of the steady diet of normal, so we left for the desert, where cars digest and regurgitate fire and even the sunrise offers more nourishment than the ones seen outside the gates. We gorged on bass and lasers, drank our fill of dust and rickety structures rising from the earth, and cleansed our palates for the other 51 weeks. We are sated for the moment, but the hunger will return sooner than we expect.
Two weeks ago, I dreamed of the city rising, but gated, padlocked, fenced at every turn. To gain access anywhere, I had to climb. Each time I reached the other side of a fence, the ground fell away where I had just been. There was no going back.
Last year’s stories are not this year’s, and dust has no control over where wind shifts it. But specks of my heart remain on the wrong side of the fence. I turn, clutch the mesh, and look for them, down into the gaping space of what used to be.
100 Proof 