Page 5 of Beneath the Desert Bloom (Of Beasts and Bloom #1)

THE WIND KICKED up just before dawn, scraping the house with fine grains of sand. The sound hissed against the windows, and the Joshua trees rattled. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote yipped once and then fell silent, like it had second thoughts about making noise.

Nora had drifted back to sleep at some point, but the wind pulled her out of it. She didn’t move right away. She just lay there, feeling her body vibrating like a tuning fork. It felt like part of her had been asleep for a long time and was just now stretching awake.

She pushed herself upright, slipping into her robe and padding to the kitchen, on a mission to make some coffee. She opened the cupboard and dug around. With a sinking feeling, she realized she hadn’t bought any at the market yesterday.

Great job shopping, Nora. You forgot the only thing that actually matters.

She settled for a glass of water, straight from the pipe.

It was warm and tasted of metal. She leaned against the sink, tugging the blinds open to let in the first light.

The Joshua trees outside looked different.

They seemed to be leaning toward the house.

She swore they hadn’t looked like that yesterday.

“Guess I’ll have to go see Gloria for my caffeine fix,” she muttered, putting on jeans and a faded T-shirt. She pulled on her boots, grabbed her keys, and slid on her sunglasses.

When she stepped out onto the porch, something stopped her cold.

Footprints… Massive footprints.

They were pressed into the dust, right by the open window. Her heart pounded in her throat. She looked around, scanning the yard. Nothing moved except a few lazy bugs drifting through the heat.

Nora took a slow breath, locked the door tight behind her, and walked to the car. She pulled her shoulders back as she climbed in, like she could shake off the feeling of being watched.

She drove fast down the empty road, lost in thoughts about what she had seen, and if, just maybe, she were going crazy.

You’re just seeing things. And hearing things. And feeling things. That’s all. Nothing is weird at all. Totally. Normal.

The diner felt too bright after the shadows of the house. Nora squinted against the morning glare as she parked in the same spot under the tattered shade tarp. The sun was already baking the pavement, making the air shimmer. She dragged herself out of the car and trudged toward the diner.

Before she even reached the door, Gloria was waiting with a to-go cup in one hand and the kind of expression that said she’d already seen whatever Nora was about to say.

“You look like you saw the ghost of your past and he tried to crawl back in with you,” Gloria said, one brow lifted.

Nora gave a tight smile, eyes still adjusting. “You always this poetic before eight a.m.?”

Gloria handed her the coffee. “Only when the desert starts talking.”

They sat outside under the sagging sunshade. The metal patio chairs creaked. The table was tacky with heat. Gloria lit a cigarette. The smoke curled upward in lazy spirals as she tapped her long pink nail against it, the ashes scattering in the wind.

Nora sat without speaking, sipping her coffee. She wanted to ask Gloria about what she was experiencing, to get reassurance that she wasn’t crazy. But she didn’t know where to start. Luckily, she didn’t have to. Gloria exhaled smoke and began speaking like she’d been waiting for the question.

“Your granddad used to talk about him,” she said, her voice low and dry. “Said he was something sacred that got twisted. Something made to protect, and then forgotten.”

Nora stared into her coffee, the surface trembling slightly in her grip. “Like a guardian?”

Gloria shrugged, her eyes fixed on the cracked sidewalk like it might answer for her. “People think the desert’s empty. Go far enough and it’s just you and the sky, right? But it doesn’t empty out. It gets denser. The more you stare into it, the more it stares back.”

Nora swallowed, her mouth dry. “I heard something last night. And this morning… there were footprints. Big ones. Right on my porch.”

Gloria’s expression didn’t change, but her fingers tightened around the cup.

“He knows you’re here,” she said.

The reply jumped from Nora’s mouth before her brain could rein it in. “I don’t think he wants to hurt me.”

Gloria looked at her, really looked, her eyes sharp, taking in more than Nora was saying.

“That’s not always the comfort you think it is, honey.”

Now that Nora was properly caffeinated, and no less hesitant to return home and see what had left those footprints, she decided to hit the library to kill some time and see what she could find.

The library was a cooled trailer stacked with secondhand books and humming computers. The librarian was a quiet man with tortoiseshell glasses and a wide-brimmed hat. He greeted her with a nod. “We get researchers out here a lot. Bigfoot, UFOs, ley lines. You name it.”

Nora scanned old newspapers on the dusty microfiche, finding plenty: missing hikers, mysterious lights, massive tracks that no one could identify. A conspiracy theorist’s dream. As the articles became more recent, a name jumped out at her. Dr. Orin Vale.

DESERT SUN BULLETIN

June 1985

“The Yucca Man: Desert Myth or Military Menace?”

For decades, residents of Southern California’s high desert have whispered about a creature that roams the washes and canyons between Twentynine Palms and Joshua Tree.

Known locally as the Yucca Man, the figure is described as towering, upright, and cloaked in coarse hair—something between a man, a bear, and a shadow.

While many dismiss it as folklore or heatstroke-induced hallucination, some of the most compelling reports come not from eccentrics or cryptid hunters, but from the military itself.

In 1971, a Marine on guard duty at the edge of the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms reported being approached by a massive, silent figure with glowing red eyes.

He claimed it moved unnaturally fast and radiated intense heat.

After blacking out, he was found unconscious by a fellow patrol.

According to unofficial sources, the barrel of his service rifle had been bent nearly in half.

Over the years, the creature has earned a litany of nicknames:

The Mojave Bigfoot. The Borrego Sandman. The Sierra Highway Devil.

In older Indigenous oral traditions, figures known as Takwis—“hairy devils”—were said to test travelers’ resolve, appearing in liminal places at moments of transformation or weakness.

Asked about the phenomenon, local cultural anthropologist Dr. Orin Vale offered this:

“The desert is full of stories people try to rationalize. But the truth is, something’s been walking this land longer than our maps have marked it. You don’t have to believe it to respect it.”

Skeptics point to dehydration, high magnetic fields near quartz outcroppings, and the brain’s tendency to seek patterns in chaos. But longtime locals insist the pattern has already been drawn.

“The desert doesn’t invent things,” Vale added. “It remembers. We’re the forgetful ones.”

HIGH DESERT RECORD

August 1992

“Search for Missing Hiker Rekindles Yucca Man Tales”

Dr. Orin Vale, a local cultural anthropologist and longtime resident of the high desert, stands at the edge of the wash where the search party last saw footprints.

“Out here, stories have a way of sticking around,” he says, his voice low but thoughtful.

“The Yucca Man… he’s part of the land’s memory, whether you believe in him or not. ”

He shifts his gaze to the horizon, quiet for a moment. “I’m not saying he took that hiker,” he adds carefully. “But sometimes the desert keeps its secrets, and sometimes those secrets look a lot like an old legend come to life.”

Each article that bore her grandfather’s name whispered a different version of the same truth: the desert was alive, and it didn’t forget.

She read his words carefully, tracing them like a map through time.

“The desert remembers everything,” he said in one.

“Sometimes the land doesn’t ask—it claims,” in another.

“We think we’re alone out here. We’re not.”

But it wasn’t just the desert he was talking about. Nora could see that now. She recognized the rhythm of his phrasing, the echo of the old stories he used to tell her as a child, about spirits in the stone, about how the land could listen if you were quiet enough.

“The land doesn’t belong to us,” he wrote in an opinion piece. “It’s not property. It’s kin.”

It wasn’t superstition. It was his own kind of science. A reverence too big for data.

Nora closed her eyes, feeling her chest tighten. Her grandfather’s beliefs weren’t just old desert superstition. They were part of who he was. And maybe, she thought, they were part of her too.

She looked out the window at the scrubland stretching to the horizon, what she’d once dismissed as barren. A wasteland. But now, she could see it differently. There was a strange, quiet order to it. A kind of beauty she hadn’t known how to look for before.

She could almost hear his voice again, low and steady beside the fire, telling stories about the land and the people who’d lived with it, not just on it.

Seeing his name in print felt like finding a piece of him she hadn’t realized was missing. His words still carried weight.

She stayed for a long time, making photocopies of the articles she wanted to keep; some for memory, and a few, maybe, for her thesis.

After she left the library, Nora walked down the quiet street to the market. She didn’t pass a single person.

A different clerk was at the counter this time, a girl with a septum ring, heavy eyeliner, and a mouth full of loudly snapping gum. She didn’t greet Nora, just stared.

But when Nora stepped closer, the girl’s expression shifted. She didn’t seem unfriendly. Just… curious. Like she was trying to place her.

She rang up the can of coffee, pint of ice cream, and bag of chips, dropping them into a paper sack without a word.

“Be safe,” the girl said suddenly, eyes sharp now, voice low.

Then she turned away and began rearranging a cup of pens like she hadn’t said anything at all.

Nora blinked.

“Thanks… you too.”

She stepped back into the blinding sun, the interaction sticking to her skin like sweat.

The sun hung high, the heat warping the air, making it feel thick and heavy.

Nora should’ve gone home. Should’ve curled up with her laptop and pretended she was a functional academic human being.

But instead, her hands moved on their own, steering the car down a narrow dirt road she hadn’t thought about in twenty years.

The sign was still there, half-swallowed by brush, letters barely clinging to the wood:

HOLLOW WASH. NO TRESPASSING.

She snorted under her breath at the NO TRESPASSING part. Yeah, that was going to work.

She parked just before the road disappeared into scrub and walked the rest of the way. Dust rose in slow, deliberate swirls behind her boots. The sound of her footsteps seemed too loud in the unnatural stillness.

Then she saw it. The Hollow Watcher. A formation of stone and heat-carved granite, leaning slightly, almost as if it were listening. The base was scorched, darker than the rest of the earth. Scattered around it were small bones, dry and bleached, littered like half-forgotten offerings.

In the center of a circle of stones sat a bundle of dried flowers, wrapped in red string. Her breath caught. It was just like the bundles in her grandfather’s house. Maybe he’d been here not too long ago.

Or maybe… someone else had.

The thought pushed through her brain, unwelcome, and she shook it off.

Great. Love that for me. Nothing says “mental stability” like chasing ghost bouquets into the heatstroke zone.

Crouching beside the bundle, she traced the tight knot in the string, her fingers brushing the brittle petals. She saw something shining out of the sand, next to the flowers, as if they were marking its location.

Obsidian. Smooth. Thumb-sized. Sitting in the dust like a gift.

She reached for it slowly. The surface was warm, almost too warm, like it was being held by someone and not just resting on the earth. Her fingers curled around it, and a soft hum slipped through her skin, low and steady, like a pulse.

It was the kind of object you were definitely supposed to leave alone. The kind people in horror movies picked up right before the sky turned red and the demons crawled out.

And yet, she pocketed it. Because of course she did.

She straightened, turning in a slow circle. The silence stretched out, vast and heavy. A gust of wind kicked up, rattling the loose stones and sending sand into her eyes.

The place had always drawn her. Even as a kid, she’d felt some kind of unnamed power here, something that made the air feel hard to breathe. Her grandfather used to say it was because the desert kept its own secrets. Some places just held on to things.

The wind moved over her shoulders, like warm breath against her neck. She shivered and turned, half-expecting to see someone behind her. Nothing was there except the desert, simmering in the heat.

Her pulse wouldn’t settle. She shook her head and took a few deep breaths. She was definitely not about to have a panic attack in front of a rock formation. That would be entirely too on-brand.

Back at the car, she slid into the driver's seat and didn’t turn the key, didn’t roll down the windows. She just sat there, letting the heat surround her, letting it pin her to the vinyl until sweat beaded between her breasts and the metal of the seatbelt burned her thigh.

She drove back in silence, watching the sun fall behind the hills, dragging long shadows across the desert like black scars. She didn’t know what she’d stirred up out there in the dust. But it had followed her home.