1

Somewhere behind the veil of dust, sun colors sky rusted metal. The faint light filtering through doesn’t help her see beyond a few steps. On these endless plains, the difference between day and night matters little. She knows she might simply be walking in a circle. She might have barely strayed from her village. Impossible to tell in this endless storm.

The fine particles find ways through each layer of wrapped shawls and cloaks, scarves and skirts torn and tucked to try and keep the gritty air from the bundle wrapped tightly at her chest. The days in the storm have embedded the cloth with dust, and each step grates skin. But she continues sliding each foot forward, bent over the bundle.

The bundle at her chest moves less, now. Is smaller than when it had been inside her. Shrank from the size of potential to the size of burden. Smaller, but much heavier.

After she’d felt it moving, she knew she could not stay. By the time she left, the village had already gathered a cairn of stones beyond the houses for her.  At first, her eyes had grown watery and inflamed as dust blew into them. Now they have settled to a dry, gritty blink.

The wind picks up and abrades exposed skin. She adjusts her rags, covers one spot, but exposes another. Each gust grates until she imagines the wind can rip away flesh and expose her true self. Yet she fears it would not be a bright, clean, burning star like what had grown inside her, full of renewal and energy and light, but a dying, faded coal, faintly fanned by each breath through an inflamed throat, about to go out.

2

The top of the rusted wall vanishes into the dust. She tries to call out, but her parched and cracked throat emits no sound. She pounds the wall with her palm, but there is no reverberation, no echoing clang like she expected. Just a dead, empty slap.

She follows the wall, trailing fingers along it, its physicality almost nauseating after days in the nothingness the endless dust creates. She needs to feel it. To know it is true and not a ghost that will vanish. That she has finally arrived. So far to find this city where others have fled before, where they had a chance at survival. A place where those who have had a star fall from the sky and land inside them were accepted, given shelter. At least that was in the stories the old crones whispered. More chance to live crossing the desolate wastes and searching for a city she knows nothing about, that might be impossible to find, than to remain behind. Each step through the unending dust, Death followed, though a different, more patient Death than the one in her village.

The wall, like the plains of dust, seems unending. Like it cuts the entire world in two, and to follow it would mean always returning to the beginning.

Dark deeper than dreamless sleep swallows the sky. Ahead, humming lights create harsh orbs that struggle to pierce the dust. Ahead, the metal thins to bars. She presses her face against the gritty, rusted metal, and can only see more dust on the other side.

“Go away.” A ghost from the haze beyond the bars.

Please, she says.

“Go away. There’s nothing for you here.”

Please take this, she says, and tries to push the bundle through the bars.

“Take it away. No one comes in.”

I can’t go back.

“Go somewhere else, then.”

3

She has an impression of a memory of a time when the sky was blue, the night overflowing with uncountable specks of light. Trees full of whispering leaves. But she cannot remember if it is something she saw once, or simply something one of the cracked and creased women in the village had told her. All she can remember clearly is the obfuscation of dust.

The bundle is so small, so weightless, and she cannot remember when she has last felt it move. Wind whips dust. All light has faded from the sky. Had there once been stars? She can not even see the dust in the air. She can only feel the ground beneath her swollen feet with each step, and even that sensation, like the grating of clothes against raw skin, has faded enough to feel like it is happening to someone else.

She has tried to keep the bundle buried, tucked away and safe, but fear moves her hands as she unwraps each layer, spilling dust that has accrued in each fold. She arrives at the bundle she’d swaddled so tightly to ensure that it would make the journey. She unwraps. Strips of cloth catch in wind and blow away.