The Desert

Vita blamed the sweat coating every inch of her body for why she couldn’t get her Lego floor one and floor two to connect right. When she bought her stucco house out in the middle of nowhere Arizona, she was mainly concerned with avoiding neighbors and being able to walk on her property without any weirdos trying to sneak a peek. What she didn’t account for was how much longer public services would take to come and fix important shit, like a bum electric line in the middle of summer.

She discarded the stupid blue Lego and laid her head next to the building instructions she had crumpled and tossed aside an hour earlier. She faintly remembered a PSA about heat exhaustion on the news: cramps, nausea, fainting. As she dozed, she figured she was probably okay, enjoying how her body relaxed into unconsciousness.

She didn’t think she’d been asleep for very long when the sound of her complaining coworkers woke her up. She forced her eyes open, sensing a wrongness like a person walking on all fours. Had their faces always been swirled in, like God had twisted their nose to the left and everything had followed? She rubbed the crust from her eyes and sat up, taking a better look at them. The second glance made it worse; she saw their two arms melded together at the wrist, and they were both missing feet, instead standing on fleshy bare stumps.

“Jesus, cover that up, will you?” said Vita, pushing herself up off the floor. Something was wrong with the air. It seemed to weigh her down as she pushed herself up, as if the dust particles were coated with syrup and was slowly turning the atmosphere into sludge. She rubbed her perfectly dry arm. “What are you guys doing here? It’s my day off.”

Vita blinked and suddenly her boss Susie was in front of her, her head a Mexican Janus blinking like a broken American Girl doll. She knew she should be worried, but all she could muster was a sense of dread knowing her boss now had two mouths to nag her with. Hoping to escape, she walked into her kitchen. She gasped at its emptiness; as if somebody had grabbed a paint roller and picked an eraser option. Vita walked to a blank wall and touched it, her finger rubbing off onto the white plaster. She pulled away and observed that the tip of her finger was now missing, exposing a nubbin of bone. “Oops,” she said, sticking it in her mouth.

“Jovita, always making mistakes, aren’t you?” said her boss’ right face.

Vita turned around, taking in the two faces. “But you have yet to fire me.” She frowned. “Really, I think you should promote me to manager. I’ve found ways to make packaging and delivery more efficient for your precious little soaps.”

The two faces warred against each other, fluctuating like gel in a lava lamp. The left side won. “Although you’ve upped efficiency, you’ve broken several codes of conduct to do so—” The right face pushed into focus with a grimace. “—all you care about is the easy way out, of your job, your life. Even that Lego disaster suffers because of your negligence.”

Vita crossed her arms, annoyance making her chest boil. Literally, the flesh bubbled and popped against her collarbone. Nobody knew about her Legos, and nobody would, because they were her hobby and hers alone. Her boss wasn’t allowed to comment on her success outside of the business, and she was going to make sure she never did again.

Vita walked up to her boss, shoving her square in the chest. Susie stumbled back, her legs shaving down to her calves as she caught herself. “You know what? Yeah, I do look for the easy way out. Because it’s just soap,” she emphasized the words with two shoves, and Susie’s legs shaved down to the knees.

The right face seethed like a horse against a bit. “You have no business talking to me—”

“No, you have no business being in my house, commenting on my own shit. I don’t live for my job, I live for the moments in between employment.” She looked Susie up and down, disgusted at how her flesh had streaked against the white tile. She had cornered Susie against the wall, and kneeling, she bent to speak to in her ear. “You really had to come here and bitch to me on my day off?” Vita grabbed her boss’ shoulders. “A word of advice: get a life.” Vita shoved Susie hard into the wall, and with a splat she disappeared, painting the plaster messily. Vita fell back onto her butt. “Oh fuck,” she said, scooting away.

She felt herself hyperventilating, and looking down, saw her ribs balloon like wood bent from wet and heat. She stood up, took a closer look at the weird portrait of her boss, and started laughing. Her laughs cut at the walls like thin daggers, streaking red and black. Still laughing, she ran out of the kitchen and into the backyard, the dry heat immediately scorching her skin. The bright sun was a slap in the face, rebooting her body into the same unexplainable calm before her coworkers had merged into her boss.

She sat on the ground, the gravel scratching under her thighs. She stared out into the desert, remembering why she had actually moved out here. She felt connected. Ever since she was little, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the world was alive with an energy that couldn’t be explained by photosynthesis or cellular respiration or decomposition. It was that energy that told her to crumble up the Lego instructions and to write a fake home address on her job application. It guided her through her whole life, and she knew it would guide her to something important when she had stepped foot on this property.

Vita looked out at the scraggly shrubbery and the dark green saguaros sticking out of the cement-hard ground. The green flesh transformed into hairy arms and legs from some ancient life predating humans, bulging and shrinking in the heat waves breathing out of the earth. Vita blinked hard, once, but they were still there. She stood to walk but nearly tripped, her ankles tangled into her garden hose—or was it a snake? —the metal mouth drooling groundwater. She reached down, untangling the plastic scales from her feet, and walked forwards, towards the cacti. As she got closer, the little green buds pointed for her to walk onwards, into the emptiness.

She walked forward, her foot sinking into the hard dirt. She would’ve jerked away if the coolness beneath wasn’t so relieving. Pausing, she thought about what she should do next. The whole hour had been like living in a fantasy novel. If she didn’t return from the earth, what did it matter? All that would miss her was her boss and her Lego sets. She stepped with her other foot, which sank further than the first. Her legs seemed to know where to go, following a hidden set of steps beneath the dusty surface. She closed her eyes as her head passed through, feeling the soft scrape of dirt against her forehead before opening them again.

“Huh,” she said to herself. It was her house, exactly as she’d left it. She looked at herself laying on the floor, asleep next to the Lego instructions. What was she supposed to do? On a second look she saw everything wasn’t exactly the same; the walls were a deep brown, carved smooth. She went over, touching its coolness, and felt like a socket as something surged from the wall through her. She pulled her hand back.

“What the fuck,” she whispered. The walls echoed the words back to her, repeating it until the air was filled with a feathery whisper. “Hello?” she said louder, and the walls spoke the word back to her again, building upon itself. She felt despair settle into her like a soggy newspaper on a doorstep. “Of all things, this is what freaks me out,” she said sarcastically. “Jesus, what’s happening to me?”  Her voice filled the space around her until she could barely breathe the air without swallowing a letter. “Stop! Whatever this is, stop it!”

Her house fell silent. She sighed deeply, then walked around, trying to find an exit. The front and back door swung into a darkness that even she knew she shouldn’t step into. She walked back into the kitchen, testing the walls for their weird paint quality, but none of her flesh rubbed onto its surface. Unsure what to do, she sat next to her sleeping self and began working on her Lego building.

“You’re missing a piece,” said a voice like two dry roots rubbing together.

“I didn’t ask for your help.” The words came out automatically, and immediately after she realized what her first question should’ve been. “Who are you?”

“I am the desert. As the desert, I am frugal, I know how to save resources and weigh growth against waste. I am overly qualified to tell you you’re missing a piece.”

She hummed angrily, looking around at the building. She couldn’t see anything missing. “Well, where is it then?”

The earth creaked happily. “Near the bottom. To the left.” Vita looked and saw a space for a two-piece Lego left empty. She wedged a yellow piece in its place.

“It didn’t really matter anyways,” she grumbled.

“Of course it did. The smallest pebble has a responsibility equal to its larger counterparts in keeping a boulder steady.”

Vita rolled her eyes. “Okay, thanks for the help, but I didn’t ask for the hippie proverb stuff.” She picked up a blue brick and tried reattaching the first floor to the second. It fit perfectly. “That doesn’t mean anything,” she said, moving onto the third floor.

The walls crumbled slightly. “I’m the magic you’ve been looking for. Why don’t you accept me?” rasped the voice.

Vita felt like the breath had been knocked out of her. She found herself wishing she hadn’t walked down the steps into the desert ground, that the magic had remained unknown and she could continue to search for it, breathe her own life into the quirky mystery she’d created for herself years ago. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, sticking two bricks together.

“I am the magic you’ve sensed since you were young. Only a few do. There is no large secret to it, it merely exists, guiding the earth in its daily functions.”

Vita was disappointed. She’d spent her whole life believing and letting this magic guide her. And now, well, it was like finding out a restaurant’s secret sauce was just ketchup and mayo mixed. She dropped her Lego piece, rubbing her arms.

“Don’t be sad, Jovita,” said the voice. “There is nothing wrong with the ordinary. It is the ordinary that makes the extraordinary possible. One can’t stay healthy long without a bar of soap, much less change the world.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Vita sank her nails lightly into her skin, “I know my job is pretty pointless.”

“I know no such thing.” The walls creaked, crumbling again. “As for ordinary, would you call the events of today ordinary, Jovita?”

She thought back to her coworkers, to the saguaro and water hose. “I guess not,” she said. “But this is probably just a dream. I think I fell asleep with a heat stroke or something.”

“I never understood why dreams are taken so lightly. Just because they happen in one’s head doesn’t mean they don’t take up space in reality.” A root snaked up from the floor, resting on Vita’s shoulder. “But I must do it your way. That is how the magic works.” The root pulled her down and she nestled into the version of herself that came with the house, finding it most comfortable to mimic the same position. “Wake up and see for yourself what is real and fake.”

Vita tried opening her mouth but all she could feel were her eyelids drooping, her body succumbing to the relaxation of unconsciousness. As she fell asleep a low grumble vibrated soothingly in her chest, whispering something. It wasn’t until she’d fallen asleep that the words echoed in her dreams.

“You are the ordinary that creates your own extraordinary.”