01# Death In the Desert

 

 

The land is empty, except for the vultures: they are having a feast.
There is a figure in the edge of perception, unseen, watching the scene.

Cristobal's body is an empty shell. His personality is no more. He is dead, forever gone. Some might say that he was taken far away by the sun god, now roaming in inaccessible realms.

Johan is waiting for the crops to grow. He has created an imaginary Eden in the middle of the desert. He lets himself believe that he is right to be worried. Because if the crops die, the black feathered monsters will come to him very soon; he is terrified of them.

The big black bird tears one last piece from the rather fresh flesh of the tired carcass. There has never been time for decay.
His carrion eating brothers are landing on the quiet heat of the desert sand. The earth is boiling silently. The sand is humming incoherent, inarticulate chants but all living limbs are deaf to its unworldly euphony.

Johan is sitting on a large rock. As always, he is pondering. He will never leave here and the place wont leave him either. He is to be part of this place. How he got here, he cannot remember. There is not the slightest grain of memory left in him. There are no footprints left from ghostly past figures.

Most likely, he is alone. He does not have any knowledge of the future. But who does anyway? Perhaps there is no future. He will probably die.
In that case it is inevitable that the vultures will come to him. Everybody gets visited by the birds sometime in their lifetime. He is no exception.

Johan cannot lift his hands in the sky and pray to the sun, because he knows that he will be disappointed by the lack of response. The sun comes only to those who are ready to leave. To those who have reached the edge. Maybe Johan can survive for a few more days, because no one can harm him the way he is -silent and still as the environment that surrounds him, matching the rock he is sitting on at the moment. No one can harm something that is as non-living-yet alive- as him.

But he has the right to choose to believe that the crops will grow, that he will gather the harvest- although deep inside he knows that he never sowed any seeds in this barren earth. He can secretly understand that there is no running water in this desolate wasteland. The sprouts are incapable of dying, because they are not even there and they have never been.
Sooner or later the vultures will sense him. They will come to him. He knew it before. But he couldn't let himself believe it.