Places choose you.

[margaret atwood]

Cicadas hum. It's the end of the day, maybe the tail of the afternoon. The light is golden, its harshness only just tapered off. There's a caliche road. Battered mesquite trees writhe themselves into knots. The cactus is everywhere, beginning to encroach on the trail. The smell of heat on dirt, heat on metal, heat on skin. The cicadas pick up the volume, rising to a drone, driving to distraction, then suddenly dropping off. 

I smell the sun on my scalp. The backs of my hands are starting to burn. I think I'm a child, or maybe I'm just ageless, what I'll be most of my time here, just hot earth under the sun. In the silence just after the cicadas I can almost hear the heat itself, waves pulsing from the cracked ground.

When I was small, I remember a fire. My great-grandparents were burning some belongings in a trash heap. There was a birdcage, black as pitch, and I'd never wanted anything so much but I couldn't have it. The fire is behind me, off to my right. I keep walking.

There's the old pickup truck from my grandparent's farm. I don't see it, or turn to look at it, but I know it's there anyway. There's a beehive embedded in the springs of the rotted seats. I could never see it through the cracked windows, but I can feel them humming in my teeth.

The heat, most of all. It smells like hair just about to burn, the flat non-scent of dead dirt. It smells like hell. The heat beams relentlessly from above but I feel most of it under me, rising. If I was only a little lighter I'd spiral into the sun, like ashes flying up toward the night sky over a bonfire. 

It's so flat here, broken only by mesquite shrub and distant mesas. The sky is almost everything there is, like it must have been at the very beginning. Nowhere to hide. The cicadas start up again. 

Why do I have this dream? Nothing happens. It stretches the way dreams do, untethered, pointless, languid. It releases me gradually into the cool grey before waking, gripped by a homesickness I understand not at all.