Free AI web copilot to create summaries, insights and extended knowledge, download it at here

Abstract

orizon or if the sand is shimmering my legs into the Earth, I see it. The wall. Reaching into the sky. This monument to folly, half-built, half-abandoned. Metal bars forged with hate and fear — before humanity thought better. Or maybe just gave up.The base of the wall looks green to my desert eyes. I can’t allow myself to hope for that. I know enough about it from the waving images on the screen. If we can believe what we see in lights and screens, visions sent from who knows where. From here you can’t see the spaces in between — I believe in them on faith. Large enough for an emaciated mother and child to shimmy through. And by the time we get there, if the gaps are too narrow, I believe we will be able to shimmer and wave like the air of this desert. Drift through anything. For all matter is only energy. All water only a phase away from its other forms. I am walking in waves to the other side of the wall.<h2 id="b3a0">Drummer</h2>The sun is high enough in the sky now that I begin to sound the skin of the drum. To send the waves leaping and shimmering over the rippling sands. Send out the call that is also a reminder: slow your pace.I carried this ancient beacon here with me because I knew that on this journey, there would be no separating the sacred from the mundane. And because I am collectin them — the wanderers, the lost, the exiles. We’ve formed a tribe. The others are curled up in the shade.During the zenith, all I do is keep the beat. Let the sun dry the fruits and blooms of the desert on the many-faced alter of the drying rock. In the cool hours, our purpose is to gather. In the heat, my purpose is to call and beat. To gather someone else. Slowly, like drops of water trickling down the desert wall, we accumulate.Under the shadow of this handful of palms. I believe in miracles, or I wouldn’t be able to accept it myself. Here, so far south.When you set up a windshield in the desert, a mass of metal growing upward it all starts with a drop of water condensing in the desert night and trickling down to the foot…then a plant grows and shades the salted earth. Water finds water, calling to itself the way I call with my drum.The human mind is no good with the ways of nature. Twice something imperceptible is still imperceptible to us, until the shadow of the water appears — the green. And then the water calls itself again, in an endless churning, form-shifting dance. Rise from the radial roots underground, breathe from the trees forming and shifting on the breeze. The children are sleeping on palm fronds. Their parents from many nations, many epochs keeping watch over our tribe.The irony of us accumulating just beyond this wall is lost on the people of this period. Everything man erects with a single mind and purpose has consequences unintended, radiating outward. We know this: the wall is a rainshadow and when the rare cloud passes this place, it bursts into tears on the spot. Shifts its form and falls to earth to caress, to soothe, to bring life from desolation.More are coming. I can smell them on the breeze. I can feel the soft tread of their alien sneakers. Somber, full of ash and soot from their journey, darkened, heavy, slow. Who knows, they may even carry seeds from far off lands. I know who is coming my way — this is not a sunset-faced man huffing through the desert sweating under cosmetic scents and facades. This is the earth liberated into the sky. Sorrow captured in l

Options

iquid form. Step by step. I pull out my blade to cut the flesh of a cactus.<figure id="fe59"><img src="https://cdn-images-1.readmedium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/1*3PwAFDL25nkkpCC3GtJ7Vw.jpeg"><figcaption>Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@jakobowens1?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Jakob Owens</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/s/photos/desert-oasis?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a></figcaption></figure><h2 id="0cfe">Crossing</h2>“When will we be there?”“Soon.”I’m not sure if it’s a trick of my eyes or if the desert is expanding before us. The wall is still rippling in the heat and still as far away. Sometimes I’m sure I see human forms dancing in the heat, rippling upward. I hold the last water bottle in my hands, shaking the last few drops, wondering when we will break and absorb them into our bodies.“We should take off our shoes. We can get there faster.”“No, no.” The heat must be getting to her first. I should have thought of it. She’s too small for this journey. “Here, drink the last water.” I lunge after her splashing the last drops, hoping to revive her.But ash is tearing off her sneakers and running in the sand. And as I give chase, she appears to be gliding over the spiny desert, the flashing pale soles of her bare feet safe from danger, while I stagger around prickling plants.“Take off your shoes. You have to.”What is left to do? Maybe if I leave my shoes behind, she’ll let me catch her. My fear is rising in my chest pounding and leaping. I can’t lose her in the heat ripples. So I toss my sneakers aside and it is only then that I notice it. A ring of shoes left behind in the desert, scattered amidst the rocks, sparse plants, and scurrying lizards — a bit like the rubble that would surround a blast zone. Or the place where an asteroid falls to Earth.The water has nearly left me and I feel light as I swim over the sands, my feet barely brushing the surface. Ash is just a few paces ahead, I can see the soft curve of her cheek as she looks back and I can (almost) reach the dusty skin of her arm. To pull her back to earth.By the time I reach her we are nothing but water, vapor drifting to meet the sun. But the wall is here. As soon as I forgot it existed, it rose to meet us. We are so many droplets gathered on the metallic surface. Sliding to earth, we collapse in its shadow.And we are not alone.Ash pushes herself to me because she sees him too. This man, who has stopped drumming and who is now walking towards us with a knife and a cactus fruit. And he is surrounded by people who could be from some time far past. Or yet to come.There are palm trees and shadows and the faintest hint of cool. And children rising out of the desert shade the whites of their eyes upon us. A boy pulls a cactus fruit from a nearby bush, throws it to the ground, and then pulls the leather of his sole over and over it, taking the spines from the fruit and into his body.The drummer’s knife flashes into the flesh of the fruit and he is holding it to us. Cool and wet and sweet. A hummingbird darts overhead. Ash is already following the other children into the shade and the hidden corners of the desert, and I know. We have crossed over.© 2020 Trisha Traughber</article></body>

Beyond the Wall

Fiction from the future.

Mother, child, flight

Sunlight is flashing off the sand, turning my eyes liquid. I wipe them as best I can with the back of my arm. Everything smudges and scratches before it disolves: the fine desert dust, the salt crusting the skin over this trek, the soot too — from my origins. No washing since the fires chased us out. I’m clumsy, smearing the elements over my face while careful to hold Ash’s hand. Why? We left the melting asphalt of the highway behind us long ago. Maybe it’s that image, the yellow diamond of man and woman fleeing over the freeway, a child in tow, her feet torn from the earth as if she might drift up on a desert updraft.

Maybe this is the thing you must fear. When you must run, when you must take to your feet and brave this journey. That the child in tow will lose her tether and drift into the atmosphere like an eagle, black and tiny against the endless pale blue, lifting on the updraft…ever, upward beyond where you can travel, see or comprehend. Or that we will change phases, shift from liquid to gas…or have our matter released into so much energy. As the world we come from is released into energy from its physical form by the gulping, gasping inferno. As matter turns to waves pulsating in an ever-slowing percussion.

Her tiny, hand seems to be melting into mine, the transpiration is pushing silt down the paths of our palms, like tiny arroyos awake for just this season. Her ponytail has lost its swing as her dark hair sticks to the back of her neck, and I can see the damp of her sweat down her t-shirt already. She’s brave. I recognize the sorrow hiding in her obsidian eyes, an ever-building pressure, a river ready to jump its bed. A lake ready to reclaim its path and push over mere manmade wonders like dams. To flood the world.

I feel the flood too, inside me. Pushing at every membrane. I can’t spill my sorrow here. If I did, would I have anything left? Or would I simply evaporate, invisible into the atmosphere, leaving nothing but a salt crust on the shifting sands? The weight of my water is maybe not even enough of a drop for the radial roots of the yucca or an ocotillo to acknowledge.

We push on at a slow and studied pace. Walking to a kind of vibration like bear hands slapping skin in the distance. The pulse rises to meet our feet. Drinking while we move. Since we left the sun has only risen in the sky and now, I’m glad I have my compass to tell me the way. There is only endless desert and a ball of fire directly overhead and the rhythm of our footsteps, ever slower. My mind invents the sound of a distant drumming and it keeps me moving at the right pace to pass through this heat. I hold Ash’s hand. It would be impossible to run off and disappear in this landscape…but to evaporate, or lift-off. The realm of possibilities is expanding like this desert, with every molecule of water that leaves my body.

And just as I begin to wonder if the heat is shimmering the horizon or if the sand is shimmering my legs into the Earth, I see it. The wall. Reaching into the sky. This monument to folly, half-built, half-abandoned. Metal bars forged with hate and fear — before humanity thought better. Or maybe just gave up.

The base of the wall looks green to my desert eyes. I can’t allow myself to hope for that. I know enough about it from the waving images on the screen. If we can believe what we see in lights and screens, visions sent from who knows where. From here you can’t see the spaces in between — I believe in them on faith. Large enough for an emaciated mother and child to shimmy through. And by the time we get there, if the gaps are too narrow, I believe we will be able to shimmer and wave like the air of this desert. Drift through anything. For all matter is only energy. All water only a phase away from its other forms. I am walking in waves to the other side of the wall.

Drummer

The sun is high enough in the sky now that I begin to sound the skin of the drum. To send the waves leaping and shimmering over the rippling sands. Send out the call that is also a reminder: slow your pace.

I carried this ancient beacon here with me because I knew that on this journey, there would be no separating the sacred from the mundane. And because I am collectin them — the wanderers, the lost, the exiles. We’ve formed a tribe. The others are curled up in the shade.

During the zenith, all I do is keep the beat. Let the sun dry the fruits and blooms of the desert on the many-faced alter of the drying rock. In the cool hours, our purpose is to gather. In the heat, my purpose is to call and beat. To gather someone else. Slowly, like drops of water trickling down the desert wall, we accumulate.Under the shadow of this handful of palms. I believe in miracles, or I wouldn’t be able to accept it myself. Here, so far south.

When you set up a windshield in the desert, a mass of metal growing upward it all starts with a drop of water condensing in the desert night and trickling down to the foot…then a plant grows and shades the salted earth. Water finds water, calling to itself the way I call with my drum.

The human mind is no good with the ways of nature. Twice something imperceptible is still imperceptible to us, until the shadow of the water appears — the green. And then the water calls itself again, in an endless churning, form-shifting dance. Rise from the radial roots underground, breathe from the trees forming and shifting on the breeze. The children are sleeping on palm fronds. Their parents from many nations, many epochs keeping watch over our tribe.

The irony of us accumulating just beyond this wall is lost on the people of this period. Everything man erects with a single mind and purpose has consequences unintended, radiating outward. We know this: the wall is a rainshadow and when the rare cloud passes this place, it bursts into tears on the spot. Shifts its form and falls to earth to caress, to soothe, to bring life from desolation.

More are coming. I can smell them on the breeze. I can feel the soft tread of their alien sneakers. Somber, full of ash and soot from their journey, darkened, heavy, slow. Who knows, they may even carry seeds from far off lands. I know who is coming my way — this is not a sunset-faced man huffing through the desert sweating under cosmetic scents and facades. This is the earth liberated into the sky. Sorrow captured in liquid form. Step by step. I pull out my blade to cut the flesh of a cactus.

Crossing

“When will we be there?”

“Soon.”

I’m not sure if it’s a trick of my eyes or if the desert is expanding before us. The wall is still rippling in the heat and still as far away. Sometimes I’m sure I see human forms dancing in the heat, rippling upward. I hold the last water bottle in my hands, shaking the last few drops, wondering when we will break and absorb them into our bodies.

“We should take off our shoes. We can get there faster.”

“No, no.” The heat must be getting to her first. I should have thought of it. She’s too small for this journey. “Here, drink the last water.” I lunge after her splashing the last drops, hoping to revive her.

But ash is tearing off her sneakers and running in the sand. And as I give chase, she appears to be gliding over the spiny desert, the flashing pale soles of her bare feet safe from danger, while I stagger around prickling plants.

“Take off your shoes. You have to.”

What is left to do? Maybe if I leave my shoes behind, she’ll let me catch her. My fear is rising in my chest pounding and leaping. I can’t lose her in the heat ripples. So I toss my sneakers aside and it is only then that I notice it. A ring of shoes left behind in the desert, scattered amidst the rocks, sparse plants, and scurrying lizards — a bit like the rubble that would surround a blast zone. Or the place where an asteroid falls to Earth.

The water has nearly left me and I feel light as I swim over the sands, my feet barely brushing the surface. Ash is just a few paces ahead, I can see the soft curve of her cheek as she looks back and I can (almost) reach the dusty skin of her arm. To pull her back to earth.

By the time I reach her we are nothing but water, vapor drifting to meet the sun. But the wall is here. As soon as I forgot it existed, it rose to meet us. We are so many droplets gathered on the metallic surface. Sliding to earth, we collapse in its shadow.

And we are not alone.

Ash pushes herself to me because she sees him too. This man, who has stopped drumming and who is now walking towards us with a knife and a cactus fruit. And he is surrounded by people who could be from some time far past. Or yet to come.

There are palm trees and shadows and the faintest hint of cool. And children rising out of the desert shade the whites of their eyes upon us. A boy pulls a cactus fruit from a nearby bush, throws it to the ground, and then pulls the leather of his sole over and over it, taking the spines from the fruit and into his body.

The drummer’s knife flashes into the flesh of the fruit and he is holding it to us. Cool and wet and sweet. A hummingbird darts overhead. Ash is already following the other children into the shade and the hidden corners of the desert, and I know. We have crossed over.