Sara Blooms Crimson Off the Desert Road

Inflorescence:

Open, midnight flower, in the death heat’s respite.
Closer, my saguaro, before the sunrise
styles gold into blue, the rays’ blinding pistil
scorches your petals.

Monsoon rain pelts the motel window. Lightning lights our lips in arrhythmic bursts. Rain gauges and research logs can wait for this. Besides, the C. gigantea my professor has us studying doesn’t even bloom until the evening. There’s more than enough time to let the rain fall. More than enough to hear Sara murmur, “Barbara,” under the thunder’s steady hum. More than enough to forget about her verdins and bats for a few hours. More than enough to quiet the metal hinge creak of her favorite turkey vultures’ calls behind the motel dumpsters. Hushed as the end of the downpour, we drift into sleep.

Sara nudges me awake. Even through squinted eyes, I see she has that strained smile on her face. The one I keep telling her not to make. The one I tell her I’d rather see her screaming at me than make. She’s already dressed.

“Hey, Barb, it’s 4:30.”

“Shit!” I spring from the bed.

I flit to the motel closet, struggling into my hiking gear. “Where’s the camera?”

“I packed it with our research logs.”

4:35 on the clock, I tie my shock of black hair back into a ponytail. I’m a hot mess, but not too hot of a mess to miss Sara clutching my car keys.

“If you drive we’re gonna be late!”

“Would you rather be late or off to meet your maker?”

“We’ve gotta be at the collection site in thirty minutes. Let’s take our chances at this point.”

That same damned toothless smile stains her face. She fingers her little cross necklace as she clearly weighs what she thinks I want her to do versus what she actually wants. With that same twitch in her eyes that she handed me a bag of guano last night, she hands me my keys. You trip and spill a bag of bat shit once, and Little Miss Ex-Evangelical condemns you a heathenous klutz.

Sara grabs our equipment as I start for the door. I hurry for my rusting sedan. Trudging from the motel room door to the trunk to the passenger seat, her head down, she trails behind me. If she’s gonna sulk, then I’m not gonna entertain it. We’ve got data to collect, and my cohort classmate turned lab partner turned roommate turned roommate isn’t gonna distract me by moping about being a little late. I start my jalopy up and off I speed.

The sun isn’t up yet, but the tension of impending heat practically suffocates us. Sara sits there, fiddling with her cross necklace. She’s sweating, and I can’t tell if it’s the lack of AC or something she’s avoiding telling me or both. No, it’s the lack of AC; I’m sweating my ass off in here, too.

I try to coax a singalong out of her. I pop in her favorite cassette: a bootleg Cyndi Lauper recording I’d snagged off somebody back in Lemon Grove before I came out here for this research. Not even the crowd shouting and singing along to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” gets her to turn her face from the window. In the concertgoers’ scratchy chanting, I catch her voice.

“I shouldn’t have done this.”

I stop the track. “Done what, Sara?”

Sara clutches her cross. “Any of this, with you, Barbara.”

“Don’t tell me you’re back on that Jesus shit?”

“No, Barbara, that’s not it,” her voice cracks.

“Then just tell me what it is!”

She holds up her watch. “I believe this will tell you enough.”

From the quick glance I muster, 5:25 flashes on the tiny clock hands. My face flushes even more than it already had with the car’s ambient heat.

“I’m tired of having to help a grown woman not act like a train-wreck of a toddler,” I catch her mumbling.

“Well, I’m tired of having to dig out how you’re feeling from that fake ass smile!”

Sara’s eyes quiver as she looks back at me. “I’d tell you sooner if you didn’t act like a train wreck of a toddler every time I told you something you did upset me.”

“Maybe if you didn’t treat me like a kid in that fuck-ass cult you left, I wouldn’t throw a—Fuck!”

Metal crunches on impact. The horizon spins as a Dodge Ram charges off. I close my eyes as the windshield glass shatters. I cling to the wheel, but at this point, I may as well be clutching a toy. My hands slide off. Lights out.

Pollination:

Silver
sparkle the rims,
golden glow the petals
flecked in the reddest specks of dawn’s
reveal:
the sedan twists open, sepals
of glass, metal calyx,
rubber roots ripped
skyward.

“God will provide.” My Mother’s verbal ablutions grew more and more hollow. God will provide her the mausoleum of carbon glinting around her finger, a sign of Father’s heavenly providence, or so she believed.

“No, no, don’t worry; God will provide for you,” she’d say, “Pray with your Father.”

God will provide; change your little sister’s diapers. God will provide: now your little brother, and another little sister, and another, and another until your first sister is trapped in the nursery with you. God will provide; let that “charming,” albino Gila monster “court” you. God will provide; he’s not a venomous, beaded lizard waiting to sink his teeth into you; he’s just a “wise” forty-three to your barely eighteen, with a trust fund and a few wives who turned out to be “traitorous libertines.”

God perhaps did provide on what was to be my wedding day. She arrived in the guise of a taxi driver with a bright red crew cut and two female symbols tattooed on her right shoulder, Claudia. We weren’t even five minutes from the chapel when I told her everything. She swerved left from the intersection to her place: baptism via greenlight.

From there, my escape was complete. God may not have been there for me all those years, but Claudia made me feel someone’s presence then. She never laid a finger on me, but she didn’t need to. She taught me how to do more than just take care of others. She taught me how to drive, how to earn my GED, how to obtain a scholarship to go somewhere beyond the confines of a cross, a ring, and a lawn not designed for this arid land. Before I knew it, I was alone, pursuing my PhD in ecology, when I met Barbara.

While Claudia wouldn’t even let me within ten inches of her, Barb closed the distance in a matter of weeks. I remember that first night our lips sparked. Everything’s sparked with her since: her tongue, her thighs, her car’s chassis as it twitches behind me. I’ve grown so tired of all this tempestuous kindling, all of this crawling out of one wreck after another to cling onto what’s bloomed so rotten between—Wait, why is my Mother’s face rising from the ground?

“God will provide,” her fingerbones split open the desert sand as she rises, a desiccated husk of sagging flesh and matted clumps of teased, blond hair with a bloodied smile.

I push against the earth, but my limbs will not move. I am but a verdin whose wing is shattered. The sky, once purple and pink with the first rays of dawn, grows sanguineous. Mother’s legs snap, bend backwards as she creeps closer. With her gait she stalks the ground as an undead stork. Her smile is taut, much like the smile I just gave Barbara before—before what? Where am I? Where is Barbara? Desperate, I fight to open my mouth. A pool of iron curdles my cries. I spit a crimson puddle from my throat, and gasp.

I throw sand at my Mother, but it does not deter her steady advance. “But I escaped you,”

“God will provide,” The refrain echoes from a tunnel of wind in her throat.

Mother’s rancid, bony digits reach toward me. Her face liquefies. Cactus needles emerge from her skull. Her body becomes a necropolis of carbon curdling under her bone white dress. The silver verdins screech in alarm. The emerald hummingbirds flee the Saguaro blossoms, the brown tourmaline-winged doves the ruby fruits. The hues of the flock dim away as the sky itself ignites, singes, goes dark with the wings of turkey vultures. No longer am I the researcher, the escaped congregant who traded empty vows for the plenary songs of birds. Distorted, once more, my Mother’s teeth rattle her refrain. Distorted, once more, I am her subject.

Senescence:

The flowers age in summer’s fervid rays,
their flesh relinquished for the fledgling fruit
to grow, survive in arid sand ablaze

with hues: the silver cross, the gilded butte,
the shine of Mother’s white-washed cactus pines,
the dark of Sara’s mouth a crimson chute.

You’ll crawl along, in search of any signs
this xeric Hell is Purgatory yet.
You’ll fight to find, escape these confines’ lines

before the tape that plays the frayed cassette,
whose appellation spells potential room
to flee the ever splendid, gleaming threat

of blaze, of flames that race to make a tomb,
a grave to join the saguaros’ withered bloom.

Maybe Sara was right about my reckless driving. Maybe that Dodge Ram should’ve watched where it was going. Either way, this might as well be Hell. The thumping of my temples replaces the radio. My seatbelt strains to keep me in place as my eyes flutter around the sights before me. The sky’s down, the rocks and sand up. No airbags to stop us, maroon smudges dot the dashboard. Shards of glass and orange metal litter skid marks going off of the road. Cacti snap and bend in my car’s wake.

“But I escaped,” I whip my head around to find Sara on the sand.

She shuts her eyes, a trail of blood coursing its way down her face. She twitches, goes quiet. I’m staring at her when the scent of gasoline strikes me. A hiss from the hood snaps me into motion. Was that smoke in front of where the windshield used to be? Out, now!

I hold my breath to not breathe in the fumes. I fumble my left arm around to turn the handle for the door. It doesn’t budge. I need to get right-side-up again if I’m gonna make it out.

I grit my teeth and white-knuckle the seatbelt as I squirm loose. My hair fails to soften the thud of metal on my head. Next time I get a shitty car, maybe I’ll pad the roof or something. Assuming there was a next time, hah. I gasp in pain as I try the handle again. Still no dice. With a grunt, I slam my boot into the window. Crack, crack, and shatter. Glass plants itself in the sand as I plop through the window.

While I crawl around glass and metal shrapnel, a bulb of black smoke from what used to be the hood billows. Pain pulses through my left shin. Cursing through red-hot, stabbing pangs, I hobble my way around the car to Sara’s side. I find her motionless, not even a foot from her side of the car.

I drag her away from what’s left of my car limb by bruised limb. From the smoke flash sparks. Sara sparks a movement. I jolt to attention. Her once symmetrical, mousy bob, now frizzy and matted with blood, cranes to me.

“But I escaped,” an upwell of blood seals Sara’s mouth, an upwell of flames on what was left of my car.

“God will provide,” a voice blows hollow, as if it drifted off of the road.

“Hello?!? Help us,” I lower Sara, wave my arms in toward the voice.

Then silence. Was it just Sara babbling after all, or is my flitty little bird-brained self starting to hallucinate? I turn her face: eyes closed, lips still. Yup, stress-and-exhaust-induced hallucinations. God damn it.

She’s as good as dead off the side of some road in the middle of bumfuck nowhere Arizona. At this rate, I’m not far behind her. I try to stand. My legs give out. I yelp, cry, then cackle as I worm my way toward the pavement. Her cruel God seems intent on proving her almost right. I’m too modern to be a train wreck. I’m more of a car crash incarnate at the moment: a dented body still trying to slide along this quickly heating sand in spite of myself. But if there’s one thing I’m gonna do, it’s drag this wreck all the way to the road while someone can still put the pieces back together.

The sun climbs higher. Vultures circle overhead as I struggle through the hazardous path. I have to take several detours to avoid the worst of the glass and fallen cactus ribs. Sweat soon mixes with my tears and blood. I’m not going to be useless this one damn time in my life, Sara. Wait, Sara? I glance back to where I left Sara when I couldn’t carry her anymore. The sight halts me.

She’s gone. She’s gone, and I haven’t done enough to save her. She’s gone, and I’ve never done enough, been enough for her. She’s gone, and in her place stands what she would very well call an abomination. She’s gone, and soon I’ll be gone, too.

She—or it?—rises from where Sara lay. Saguaro spines stab through where her eyes should be. Raggedy saguaro petals, burnt as if left to rot in the desert sun, litter her mountain of blond curls. It’s probably for the best that a plain white dress covers most of her body. What little bits of flesh remain on her fingers and neck swell in sickly green. She opens a tattered bible in her left hand. She hobbles toward me, her limbs snapped backwards. She nears, opens her mouth. Spines twist around instead of teeth and tongue.

“God will provide,” she draws nearer.

“What are you?!?” I sit up, facing the creature.

“God will provide,” closer, still.

“Whelp, so much for answers, huh?”

She stands right over me now. She takes off her cross necklace, kneels in front of me as she holds the cross in her right hand. Her gaze—or what I can make of it, considering she has spines instead of eyes—tracks toward the pages of her little sky daddy tome.

“Very truly I tell you, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live,*” The gangrenous green fingers of her left hand holding the book open, she raises her cross with her right.

“Ok, now is really not the time to proselytize—” I burst into a scream.

Into my shin it goes. She plunges the cross, all the while chanting. The first strike shocks me silent. She stabs again, draws blood. In vain I thrash. Her other hand no longer holds her precious book. Her cactus flesh vices around my right ankle. No matter my thrashing, her hand clamps down as if a whole saguaro’s pinning me to the baking sand. Tighter she wraps around my ankle, scratching different parts of me with her cross. Seeking something, anything to hit her back with, I whip my neck around. Scraps of rusty metal: too far. My hands can’t even approach them. I look into the sky.

Dark wings circle. I wonder if they’ll make a good meal out of me. A meal! I wonder if this cactus-zombie-televangelist-abomination mommy would make these turkey vultures lick their lips. Well, if turkey vultures had lips, anyway. Their rusty hisses and creaky grunts jump out of my throat.

Hiss: the vultures come down. Feeding time, my little sky dumpsters. They perch upon her shoulders. Peck by peck they pluck morsels of dry-rotted flesh. I almost feel sorry for the creature as her grip goes limp, her chant falters. Her voice falls to a sandy groan, too gritty to drown out the chatter of the hungry wake. I delude myself into thinking I’m scrambling away. If Sara were awake, she’d rightfully (hate to admit that, but I’m a little too close to dead for pride) call it shambling away.

I start on my same desperate trek to the road as the monster’s muffled gasps scatter behind me. Pavement! I sit up and scream for help. I rattle my body and arms like a half-deflated tube man for used cars somehow more rundown than mine. Among the mirages radiating from the road, tires approach.

A glint lights the corner of my eye. I look back as car brakes screech. Sara blooms crimson off the desert road, her eyes open.

So I haven’t been completely taking a break. That said, it’s felt like an enjoyable break to go back and polish something I’ve already made. I’m sure at some point in the future I’ll come back to this story and improve it further. I’m happiest with the little tweaks to the first verse (those who are savvy about their forms might be aware I oopsied and didn’t quite hit the line requirements for an English adaptation of a minor Sapphic stanza in the earlier version, sue me), as well as with the decision to switch most of the story into the present tense. For those of you who were there for the first installment of the earlier version will also see some other shifts (in my opinion for the better, but who knows? Death to the author and all that, as long as I don’t come back rampaging with cactus spines in my eye sockets). Let me know what y’all think of this version regardless in the comments!

Also, y’all are getting this a little bit later, sorry not sorry. I’ll be posting things I don’t intend to submit to publications on my wee little website first, which you can find here.

*: John 4:23

Image Attribution: By Ehiris at English Wikipedia, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17690109