Leroy wakes up in a desert turnout, contorted in his truck bed like he tried to hold himself together in his sleep. His head throbs. His mouth tastes like blood.
The sun is already climbing. The sky is too clean, too wide. No eyes for miles.
The desert has stripped him thin, but that’s the point. It’s burning off the wrong parts, leaving only what his wife will recognize when he goes home.
Athena wakes in a guest bedroom with white plaster walls, glass doors, and a rug that was woven by someone else’s hand. The lovers have the “escape” house to themselves. Her parents come out for three-day weekends, art books piled on the counter, a fridge stocked with microdose capsules and sweating fresh-pressed juices.
Charlie lies beside her, eyes closed but not asleep. She kisses the soft hollow of his neck and waits. He doesn’t move. The silence stretches, and she listens to the wind.
Leroy’s skin prickles, sweat coming cold. His jaw seizes until his teeth ache. A high ringing fills his ears. Constant, metallic, like power lines. Sleep never lasts. The blistered land sharpens into something unreal—shapes moving at the edge of vision, voices carried by the wind.
Out of the corner of his eye, the rocks shift into his wife’s profile. She turns away from him, as always.
He grins anyway. The desert is speaking again. Testing him. Seeing if he’ll flinch.
Athena posts a picture: bikini top, tasteful Facetune, one of Charlie’s cigarettes between her pouty lips, Joshua trees like set dressing. She watches Charlie scroll past it, liking but not commenting.
Her sort-of-ex texts her within five minutes.
been a while. how are you
so good 🙂 she writes back. She tells him everything new except Charlie.
Leroy scrolls porn on his cracked phone, the volume high enough to fill the cab. He rewinds the same second again and again—spider lashes, pink tongue. He imagines his wife beneath him, his hand on her jaw. “Look at me,” he says to the screen.
The screen goes dark. Static fills the cab.
Athena bends over in the passenger seat. Charlie keeps one hand on the wheel, the other tangled in her hair. His eyes flick again and again from the empty road to his reflection in the rearview mirror. He watches himself be a man.
Her jaw aches. When she lifts her head, she wonders if he noticed her at all.
The heat wavers on the horizon, the road turning liquid in the distance. Leroy squints and sees a figure walking along the shoulder, small against the expanse. A girl. Thin arms swinging at her sides, hair loose and dark.
His chest seizes. He knows that walk, on the balls of her feet, just how his daughter used to balance on curbs.
“Baby?” he calls, voice cracking. The figure doesn’t turn, but she doesn’t fade either. She keeps moving, steady, as if waiting for him to catch up.
He lurches out of the truck, legs unsteady. Gravel cuts through his boots as he stumbles forward, arms opening before him. The ringing in his head stills, silence wrapping him. For a moment, it feels like grace.
Close enough now: the line of her cheek, hair flicking in the wind. His throat locks with joy. She’s real enough to touch.
Then the shimmer folds in on itself. The girl collapses into a Joshua tree, its crooked branches twisted into mockery of arms. No eyes. No mouth. Nothing human.
Leroy stops short, breath shuddering out. He laughs, ragged, and wipes his face with the back of his hand. “Good one,” he roars with the wind.
Athena and Charlie wander the thrift shops in Yucca Valley. She finds a slip almost worn through, a name written on the tag: M. Flores. The fabric still remembers the body before hers.
Charlie tries on scuffed cowboy boots, strutting down the aisle. “Outlaw,” he says, pretending to spit. He stumbles over his own feet and laughs too loudly, embarrassed.
She smiles and buys the slip that will hang just right from her collarbone. Later, she’ll ask Charlie to take a picture, the afternoon sun turning it see-through. She wants to be beautiful and not even know it.
On the shoulder, a hare stumbles. Leroy leaps out and cradles it to his chest. Its heartbeat drums against his ribs. “Shhh,” he says, rocking.
He holds too tightly. Bones snap. The body sags.
He kisses its fur before laying it across the hood like a child in bed. He strokes its ears flat.
Leroy aims the truck down Reche Road. He straddles the yellow line. Gravel sings under the tires.
Charlie makes Athena film him at Giant Rock. Dust blooms around the car as he spins donuts. She waves grit from her eyes, filming anyway.
Later, she types: miss you. Deletes it. Tries again: wanna see my new dress? Sends that one.
She puts on M. Flores’s slip in the guest bathroom. For a moment, the mirror shows a different face. She blinks. Hers returns.
The sand burns white. Leroy claws at his chest, sweat soaking through his shirt, his body purging itself. Out past the windshield, the horizon ripples into a mouth he knows.
Static hisses through the speakers.
He presses harder on the gas. The desert cracks the door open. This time, he’ll make it through.
Charlie wants to take the back roads. He likes the way the car shakes, he likes ruining Athena’s selfies, watching her drop her phone to hold on for dear life.
Far ahead, Leroy catches the bloom of headlights. The oncoming car swells, shapes resolving: a boy at the wheel, a girl beside him.
For an instant, her face sharpens into his wife’s, then his daughter’s, then something more—someone waiting. She looks at him with such intimacy, as if she knows him, as if she needs this, too. She calls him home. The moment bends wide, perfect.
His chest breaks open with joy. After all the trials, the desert has burned him clean. He is ready now.
Leroy steers into the center line, murmuring, “Home.”
Charlie jerks the wheel, brakes screaming. The car slams into the shoulder. Athena’s body snaps forward into the belt. A dust cloud billows, swallowing the truck, the desert, the shrubbery that has carved lines into the new paint job.
When the dust settles, Athena is screaming. Charlie tastes iron. The truck glides on as if unaware.
Athena shakes and cries over diner pancakes she can’t stomach. “You saved us,” she tells Charlie, reverent.
His reflection wavers in the steel napkin dispenser. His jaw flexes; his eyes are red at the edges.
“Don’t,” he mutters. His hands tremble under the table. “It was nothing.”
Her gaze stays on him—admiring, grateful. A look he thought he wanted. It presses against his chest until he can’t breathe.
His girlfriend says, “His eyes. I can’t stop seeing his eyes.”
Leroy keeps driving. Sweat beads his temple. He strokes the wheel like it’s something alive. He feels it in his blood, scoured clean.
The horizon blooms into pale light. Not a mirage this time, but the sun itself, opening a door.
He doesn’t blink. The road narrows, endless. He keeps his eyes open until the desert gives him back.
Athena showers until the mirror fogs. She lies on the bed without her phone, but it hums anyway, phantom buzzing in her palm.
Every time her eyes close, the truck returns. The man’s face, the weight of his stare, close, consuming.
She lifts the mirror from the table. For a moment the eyes in it don’t blink with hers. They’re too wide, too intent. She lowers the glass, but the gaze lingers. She turns the glass face-down on the floor.
“Don’t,” she whispers, the words catching in her throat. “Don’t look at me.”
Beside her, Charlie lies with eyes shut, a pulse beating in his temple. Awake, listening. She can feel it in the tightness of him. But he doesn’t move, doesn’t answer. The silence thickens, the air already crowded with too many eyes.
The wind presses at the glass doors, insistent. She imagines opening them, stepping out into the light, standing in the headlights of nothing.