The Infinite Desert: A Fictional Narrative

Everything was the same this night. The woman’s house still stood, isolated on the slopping hill on the edge of the sleeping town. The single light in the house still shown through red-veined windows, casting shadows on the chair where the woman sat, but she was not in it. Every night the woman leaves in the unbroken night. No one sees her leave. She silently dissolves into the night. The woman travels to the same place every night. She is always unaware of the journey she had taken to come to this place, to stand with weary, weathered feet on this distant earth that was not so unfamiliar anymore. She was not concerned, just tired from her journey here she always presumed. The earth beneath her scorched her bare feet. The torrid sands surrounded the woman, stretching themselves like waves infinitely in all directions. This place knew no night. It was always day and the sun, which loomed over the sands, selfishly monopolized the sky. Having traveled to this place every night for the past three years the woman knew that if she walked west she would come to an isolated arrangement of statues. She walked west, after a time not feeling the sands beneath her feet, not feeling anything. When she came upon the statues she sat down before them as she did every night enjoying their mild company in this desolate place. The five statues stood in a crescent configuration. They were all depictions of human forms carved from a pure white, metamorphic stone. The woman