Unreal Country
It was dry, arid, rocky. There was no sign of a stream. The road, a track of sand, wound through rocks and between mountains. We might have stopped even there to drink, if there had been water. But we did not dare to stop; we did not even dare to think.
In that place we could have believed that a single unfortunate blow had rendered a land unhappy.
Our thought was replaced with drumming chants. Old rhymes ran through our heads. They were relentless. They were irregular. They were repetitive.
We tired of our jokes. We were not in Kansas. We had never been to Kansas. For all we knew, we could be in Kansas.
The sand crept into our boots. We became yet more dry.
The rocks were curious; they were like rotting teeth. But we barely looked at the rocks. We could not stop; we surely could not rest. To sit there would have been death. To lie down would have been worse than death. And even in the dryness there was a distant sound of thunder.
Memory attacked us, it assailed us, it assaulted us. We saw re-enactments of unsatisfactory encounters. We renewed the motivation from a distorted tarot reading. We shared the memory of drowning; though we had not drowned.
And we were not alone. Faces stared at us from houses in the rocks, hostile faces painted in ochreous clay. Whatever people they were, their disguise hid them entirely. We had received no rumour of them.
Our experience became a participation in a half remembered and half familiar text. We became the fragments. We became the ruins. We were deprived. We were derived.
Then it began to snow.