One foot in front of the other

Balancing across the cracked ground. A thin line to walk. Feet burning hot, soles pressing firmly onto the cracked baked surface. Another one hundred yards, roughly to go. Sounds of your breathing only. Pain racks you from head to toe but you walk on. You must. Your mind cannot wander as one false step and the precious drops of water you have been carrying will trickle away. Sucked into the dehydrated ground and again thirst will come for you.

The thin stretch of ground you balance on acts as a bridge across the dried-up ravine, which has become your lifeline. Discovering it was chance and a miracle that had blessed you for a while. However, you soon came to realise how malicious it was. You fell a few times and you had thought that this was going to be the end. Flailing wildly you had only broken your fall by clutching at crumbling red and orange rock that shifted dangerously under your sweaty hands. The jutted tocks that peeked out of the sheer sides of the ravine were both help and death at the same time.

Letting yourself abseil off the crumbly red rock warned you to never fall again. Down. Down. Into that red hot abyss ready to be cooked like a chicken in the roasting sun. When you had stopped falling and your feet touched that flaming hot solid ground, you had winced in pain but were grateful for the falling to have stopped. The ravine had looked lifeless from above but once inside a whole metropolis of animals lived there. Huge spiders with more hair on them than a bear's coat scuttled past you, around you, up your legs and circling your waist. Camouflaged snakes hissed past, menacingly warning you that you were on their territory and even now you can remember the feel of a cold snake's tail lashing you on the foot. There was life teeming in that ravine that you did not want to see or want to be a part of.

Suddenly you feel yourself off balance and you come back to the present. You are walking across a thin stretch of ground carrying two jugs of water. Your first drops of water in a week. Not a scintilla, an air bubble could be wasted. You focus your mind as you are very much aware of the danger of overthinking things. You are alone, very much lonely and extremely aware of the fact that you are dying. Sometimes you wish for a sudden end mainly a pain-free end but at other times you sometimes find it in yourself to be hopeful and await rescue. Someone must know that you are gone and someone, somewhere out there must be looking for you.

By this point, your whole body is screaming at you to stop and your feet are asking why you are abusing them, but you cannot stop. You begin to walk mechanically as if someone is guiding you on puppet strings. One foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the other. You concentrate with an infinitesimal amount of care as to where you place your feet. You accidentally lurch a bit too much to the side of the bucket. You give a groan of despair, right yourself and off you go. One foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the other. Then you are across the thin stretch of ground, the miracle find, the death trap, onto the other side of the ravine. Self-confidence begins to build inside of you. You made it across the hardest part of the journey. Your eye spots one of the markers that you left yourself to get back to a makeshift camp. A scratched cross accompanied by a wonky star.

You begin to walk faster but not too fast as you do not want to lose a single drop of water. Your stomach rumbles reminding you that you have not eaten since the sunrise. Out here you have no sense of time so the days start to merge blurring into a sequence of sun rises and the sun sets. You have no clue how long you have been out here but whole galaxies have combusted you feel in the time that you have been stuck here. Sunsets and sunrises. That is what you live for now. Sometimes you wonder what it would be like to be rescued. How would people react to you? Could you return to civilisation and leave behind this dirty, primal, bestial life? You have no clue how you look or if your voice even works anymore. There’s no one to speak to and you have to be alert at all times so you you do not even speak to yourself. You have to conserve energy and so now you survive on the bare minimum.

Again, you have allowed your mind to wander too far and you berate yourself. Then you realise that you have strayed too far off course. You should have passed your second marker by now. Your head spins a little and you set down the jugs. Greedily, you allow yourself a sip of the precious load. O sweet nectar of the gods! The refreshing water slides down your dry and parched throat with a little difficulty and your tense organs relax a little thanking you for saving them. You look around at your surroundings not that there is much to see. Just reddish brown ground reminding you of your favourite, cocoa-dusted brownies. You lick your lips in Anticipation of food. It looks like a dinner of Beatles again tonight. One scurries past you kicking away under 1 swift action you stump on it will stop you twist your foot to the left and to the right to ensure the creature is fully dead. You dangle it in front of you to check it is not moving and crunch it between your teeth without a moment's hesitation.

If you thought about it you'd be repulsed at the idea of eating insects so that is why you do not think about it. With not much else to eat you cannot be picking out here. You pick up the jugs of water again and resolved to head back to camp to check the traps you laid out earlier in the day praying some unwitting animal stumbled into it not knowing it was going to be eaten for dinner that evening. The last animal you ate was a snake though you found it tough and stringy to eat but it was filling and lasted two sunrises and three sunsets. You pick up the water jugs and away you walk praying it is in the right direction.