Page 24 of Spread Me
Only half the lights are on in Sweet Ramona’s. It’s the end of the night. The team has taken over the long, scarred table in the middle of the room. Ramona herself approaches with a tray of shots—something dark and bitter that no one ordered.
“Sounds like things are going well for you kids tonight,”
she says, raising one tattoo-notched eyebrow at the jar of cash that sits in the middle of the table. It’s surrounded by a sea of discarded shot glasses.
“This round’s on me.”
The tray of shots looks like a revolver chamber full of oiled bullets. Everyone on the team takes one, their tongues already flinching away from the idea of whatever Ramona might be inflicting on the group. Kinsey raises her glass in a wobbling hand, and looks around the table.
“Domino. Mads. Nkrumah. Jacques. Saskia. You all decided tonight that you want to stay out here, in this fucking gorgeous awful place, for another six months. Every single one of you is a fool for giving up the opportunity to return to polite society.”
At the opposite end of the table, Mads raises their shot back to her.
“What about you, Boss?”
Domino goes next.
“Will you stay?”
Jacques follows.
“Or will you go?”
Saskia raps the bottom of her glass on the table before lifting it. “With us?”
Nkrumah goes last.
“Or alone?”
Kinsey raises her hand high overhead. The smell of Ramona’s round slaps her hard, bitter and herbal. She grins at her team. Her friends. Her family.
“I’m in it ’til the end.”
They drink together, shout expletives at the diesel taste of the liquor, and together, bring their jar of cash to the bar. They can’t think of anything that could possibly tear them away from this place.
***
The night air wraps around Kinsey’s bare thighs as she pulls herself up into the Jeep. The wind isn’t as bad as it’s going to be, but it still twines freezing fingers through Kinsey’s hair, tangling it behind her. It sinks through the thin fabric of her shirt, plucks at the skin over her ribs, bites at her throat.
She slides the key into the ignition, presses her bare toes against the grooved plastic of the gas pedal, and takes off into the night, leaving the station and everything in it behind.
She doesn’t bother turning the headlights on. After the Jeep has eaten a few miles of dirt road, she eases her foot off the gas. The car rolls to a stop sooner than she would have guessed—the weight of it, she supposes, is more than enough to arrest its momentum. There’s no need for the brakes, no need even to take the keys out of the ignition. She leaves the Jeep where it is, idling in the middle of the ribbon of packed dirt that cuts through the sand and connects the station to the main road.
The desert stretches out around her like clean bedsheets stretched across a new mattress. A hundred miles of sand in every direction, a million flowers, a billion insects. There’s more life around her than there is inside her. She sifts her bare feet through the sand. She’s never done this before—never walked out into the desert without protection on every part of her body, sunscreen and hiking boots and thick wool socks, a hat and sunglasses, everything she could think of to prevent her and this place from truly touching each other.
“You,”
she whispers, toeing a hole in the sand that she knows leads down into an anthill humming with activity. The tickle of legs on her ankle as the ants respond to the threat of her presence, the sting of a bite on the inside of her knee. She keeps walking, feels a rock embed itself into the bottom of her foot. “You,”
she says again.
There are more stars in the sky here than anywhere else on earth. She doesn’t know if that’s true, but she’s always thought it. A coyote lets out a series of demonic yips in the distance and she understands—she also wants to scream, to cry, to rip the sky into confetti with the sounds that can emerge from her throat.
“I can’t believe I said all that,”
she says, her voice coming out hoarse. She steps over a shadow that might be a cactus and might be a rock and might be nothing at all. The wind picks up, whistling the sand into eddies all around her.
“I can’t believe I yelled like that. I’m sorry.”
There’s a rustling behind her. She looks over her shoulder and sees nothing. Not a figure, not movement. Not the Jeep, either—it’s out of sight, which she knows means she’ll never find it again. Getting lost in the desert is as easy as blinking, as easy as getting distracted. As easy as walking a few paces in the wrong direction.
“I meant it, though,”
she says, feeling her way forward. Something scuttles out of her way.
“I meant everything I said. I didn’t want any of what you did.”
There’s a space in front of her, a clear patch where maybe something got ripped out of the earth and blew away. She squats and runs her hands across it, shifting sand to one side.
“I didn’t want the theatre. I didn’t want the games. Do you understand?”
The wind sweeps across the desert toward her, making her shiver.
“I don’t want you to make a body for me. I don’t want you to steal someone else’s cock and fuck me with it. I don’t want you wet and moaning, I don’t want you soft and panting—I don’t want that.”
She stands to look down at the dark patch of black sand she’s unearthed. It shouldn’t have been this easy to dig down to, not with her bare hands, not this fast. It’s almost as though the desert peeled itself back for her.
She’s looking down at the cryptobiotic crust—the layer of life under the desert, the home of everything that moves beneath the sand and keeps the soil where it belongs. The cryptobiotic crust, which is, in this place, infected. Kinsey looks at it and she knows it’s sick, because she feels heat rising in her like the sun coming up over the rocks. Need pulses in her, between her legs and up her belly and in her throat.
She pulls her shirt and underwear off in a rush, throwing them into the darkness for the elements to tear to pieces. No one will ever find them. Not out here.
Kinsey steps forward gingerly, aware that she’s destroying life with every step. Gooseflesh rises across her shoulders. The wind teases her taut nipples, curls its way between her legs, tugs her forward.
She sinks to her knees between the piles of sand she’s cleared away. A shiver overtakes her as her skin comes into contact with the viral lichen that lives beneath the desert soil.
“I only want you,”
she says.
“I want you as you are. I want you to be with me. But not the way humans are with each other. We only know how to fuck things or kill things, or fuck things until we’ve killed them, or kill things until it feels like fucking them.”
She eases herself onto her stomach and presses her mouth against the sand, letting it coat her tongue with grit and salt.
“I want you in more ways than that. Better ways. I want you inside me. I want you as you are.”
The living thing beneath the desert surface hears her. It winds the virus around her ankles, her wrists, her throat. It reaches fingers of fungal hyphae into her mouth, traces the veins of her tongue. It hums through the sweet folds of her vocal cords to draw a scream out of her, the kind of ecstatic sound she’s longed to make for as long as she can remember. She digs her fingers into the sand, curls her toes into the minute paths carved by wind and scant water, sings a song of brutal sun and static storms and high screaming winds.
The lichen rises up out of the earth to kiss the tenderest, pinkest parts of her, the places where she’s most alive. It makes her feel the blistering pink of the sunset over the dunes, the high-noon screech of a dying thing’s thirst. It stretches her wide and wet, feels the velvet of her deepest pleasure, pushes her open until her tendons creak with strain. Finally, when she can’t bear it anymore, when she cries out to the darkness in agony and ecstasy and perfect sweet becoming—finally, at last, the virus takes her, sinking itself into her cells all the way to the hilt.
And it understands, as it draws her into spun filaments of ecstasy, that she really did mean everything she said. She wants it just as it is: perfect, and hungry, and alive.
She takes it all.