Looking for Quiet

The sound of her kicking gravel was the only sound in the empty desert valley. It was hot but not unbearable. Intoxicatingly still. Quiet.

She’d come to the outdoor museum to get away from the loud of the Las Vegas strip. Her friends had wanted her to be a part of their girls weekend out, but from the moment she’d set her sneakers on the sidewalk of that crowded distraction of a landscape, full of noise and chaos, she knew she wasn’t meant to be there. This thought shook her. She felt like the first woman to think that. Doesn’t everyone want the freedom of being able to misbehave among a throng. Not her. Not this time.

She followed her friends from club, to bar, watching the men swelling like birds in a nature documentary. She imagined them talking about all they could offer. Their plumage crisp suits, and well chosen ties. Her friends seemed to enjoy the attention. The alcohol poured freely and the drinks were neon in the black light.

“Appletini?” A man whispered near her ear. He wore a dark green suit, and the pattern reminded her less of a bird and more of a reptile. She squinted at him, and he seemed familiar. As if they’d met somewhere before, and not once, but many times. She was about to take the drink from his hand, as if hypnotized.

“Eve?” One of her friends called her name, in a concerned fashion. She turned her head and the man was gone. She felt existentially nauseated, as if she’d just narrowly avoided a car accident. She had continued to follow her friends but had felt out of sorts after her encounter with the man…entity…ghost?

She had told her friends she was going back to the hotel to take a nap. She had been going to take a nap. To sleep through the exhausting weekend of merry-making. But when she’d gotten back to the room, there was an old brochure on her bed side table. Overlooked by the hotel cleaning staff, maybe. But it seemed older, as if it has always been there, in this room, waiting for her.

The brochure had been a list of ways to get out of Vegas. A ghost town. A bunch of cars stuck in the ground. A gas station with alien beef jerky.

The description of an outdoor art gallery had spoken to her. She could use the opposite of this environment.

It was east to rent a car in Vegas. She put the address for the place in her phone and the soothing voice of her personal robot assistant had gently steered her in the right direction.

…and now she was standing in the quietest place she’d ever been. When she moved the sound echoed off the distant canyon walls. There was no wind. Just sand, gravel and one empty building with a wooden set of stairs leading to the door of the museum…art gallery…info centre…

There was a large sculpture tableau of what reminded her of the Last Supper but laid out with giant sheet ghosts made of painted metal to the far left of the office building. She walked up the wooden steps, each creak disturbing the peace of the place. She had the instinct to take off her shoes, and found herself unlacing and removing them. Her steps were quieter then, and she felt more at ease in her surroundings.

CLOSED FOR THE SEASON

A hastily written note was on the door, in a not terribly legible scrawl as if someone had left quickly.

Were there seasons in Las Vegas?

There was a couch made of glass mosaic to the right of the information building. She felt drawn to it. She went over and pulled her legs up onto it. It was oddly comfortable for glass. She felt, all at once, in her element. As if this was the one place she belonged. She had an urge to curl up and take a nap right there. She fell asleep in the quiet of the desert. She dreamed of a lush place full of trees. Of a fountain. Of a man she didn’t quite know.

When she awoke it was cooler, and the light had begun to dim. She knew she should be getting back to the hotel, her phone was full of texts from her girlfriends wondering where she was.

She dismounted the glass couch and instead of returning to her car she was drawn by an unseen force. She needed to get a closer look at the far out statues depicting the lord, but not her saviour, and his apostles.

She hasn’t realized how big the art piece was, or how far away, and her shoes were still in her hand as she walked. She was looking up at the bizarrely detailed sheet ghost eyes when she felt her toe hit something which rolled away from her.

She looked down to find a perfectly round, and red apple. That shouldn’t be there, she mused. Not a tree in sight. Apples don’t grow in deserts, do they?

She bent down to pick up the oddly out of place fruit. It seemed freshly washed, strange considering it’s placement.

She felt a whisper in her ear, and in her periphery, on her shoulder a snake had crawled to coil upon it.

“Eve”, it’s voice clear and without the lisp she had expected from all her years watching animated movies.

She cocked her head to get a better view of her visitor, a snake of indiscriminate size, ghost Jesus looking down at her through his ghost sheet.

”You’ve got the wrong girl.”

She shrugged the snake off her shoulder, it fell and she could hear it slither away, the sound loud in the quiet.

She rubbed the apple on her dress, and took a bite. It was refreshing. The sound of crunching reverberated in the cool dry air.

This was the best apple she had ever tasted. In all her lives.