A little Death, is good for the Soul

Part 2

There was blood. Blood! For a little while, but it seemed longer - relatively speaking it was probably seconds - she heard nothing. She saw nothing but the blood that rapidly pooled beneath her left elbow, on the tarmac. Then, a tapping noise and something hard clattered on the hard walkway. Footsteps falling away and fading out….

 One thing begets another, clouds batter the sky like a threat; the people and the world remain unaffected for the most part. There is no pie in the sky all-knowing righteous starship fairy king that dispenses karma like ice cream sprinkles to the wronged, or inflicts lemon imbued hemorrhoids on the wicked. It seems a person makes her own fortune, or lives on the whim of another’s:

                After the long ride back from the monument, the RBT, Nessay spent time in her office. It was a shared space, her part being an old metal desk that wobbled, with two drawers that couldn’t close flush, and didn’t come remotely close to locking. There being no key, that was moot. She sat on a wooden chair for a few moments and fiddled with the various rock samples she had stored on a tray, collecting her thoughts. Then she scribbled a dozen notes onto a pad of paper and ripped off the sheet. Nessay was the field supervisor for the RBT, but not the region boss. This was her way of keeping the boss duly informed.

                She looked at her watch. Daylight would be done over soon enough. Still time for a bit of wall ball, just to clear her mind. Technically this was her day off.  The door was open, but nobody was around, so Nessay rummaged through the bag she had stored in the office and pulled out some shorts and a t-shirt. She pulled off her shoes, and her office cloths, then redressed quickly, looking over her shoulder the whole time. There was a small wall court behind the field headquarters and she could be out hitting a ball in minutes, just needed a water bottle her equipment. Stepping out the door she rubbed her shoe on the metal threshold and felt a curious scraping. Nessay leaned on the jamb and bent her knee, grabbing an ankle to scope the sole of her shoe. Her eyes widened as she spied something small and round lodged into the treads of her sneaker: one of those damned metally balls, she thought. “Feathers and duck beaks,” she swore out loud. “Oh Gods of Thunder, cook me with a Cuban. This day’s amuck!” Nessay felt a pinge of guilt for the business she’d given Jocu’le.

                Too many mucks in a row, Nessay had had it. She undressed and redressed, not giving a flip if anyone was around or not, and packed up. The little ball, made of what she didn’t know, Nessay dropped into her pocket and zipped it in. She rubbed her pants and felt the hard pill snugged in, safe

and tight. Better than in a rickety metal desk with no locks, she thought.  “A drink!” she said, and headed out, dropping the note in the box by her boss’s door. She knocked in case he was there, and then skipped out into the dust, sipping on her bottle contently.

                Getting from here to there was easier, and quicker, then the trip out to the site. The field office was in a small row of low buildings that was cut into a rock shelf in a sea of sand. It was a small compound just a mile beyond the city of Willowy. The dust stroked the sheltering poplars and whistled through the antennae and sand etched dishes spoking up from the offices. Nessay straddled her electric animal and trotted out of the hollow toward home. Her room was in one of many little houses that bubbled up like puffy white fungi, encircling the outskirts of the Willowy storm wall. The ever present gales of sand and grit mostly slipped around the clay drenched mounds, of course transporting bits of the structures down the way to settle on someone else’s porches and window sills. Nessay thought about things like the dust and porches and even pianos, though she’d never seen one except in pictures. But if there was one around here, somewhere, there would surely be dust on it, wouldn’t there?

                Just down the road she turned off and moved down a slight slope. There was a rock abutment a hundred yards out, and it looked West over the dunes and a mostly unobstructed view. Well, no wall ball, but no reason not to watch the sunset. Nessay got down from her beast and dropped over the wall, shrugging down and splayed out comfortably to enjoy the show. She was just in time. The golden orb was dipping into the dissipating dust cover and sinking through the shifting dunes. Colors crept up and spread out over the horizon, twinkling off the wind whipped sand prisms. Nessay loved that most about this place, the desert. She stayed there until the night sky covered the dunes like a blanket. A thick, cotton spread of stars and galaxies. Maybe a planet two, but Nessay didn’t know which little bright pinpricks were their closest neighbors. That star was a little blue, that one a bit red… oh never mind.

                It was plenty dark as she got back to home. The roads became harder and freer of sand closer to town, and she braked a little as her animal winded among the habitats. Metal on metal squealed, the rotating hooves clattered on the bricks, and her white home popped into view. She cozied up the electric animal to its stall and swung down, pulling her bag smoothly off the pommel. Her room was an open space, nearly 500 square feet divided between a bedroom and living space, in a shared dome house.

                Nessay walked around the curved dome to the second door, her sneakers kicking up silent dust from the concrete pad when she heard a sound, a click, then nothing but night. She wondered, she thought about it, but not too much. Is that blood? What would become of the little round ball, she remembered, in her pocket? Her one arm was bent, the other seemed to be under her leg?, and she could just brush her pant pocket, feeling the mysterious little thing there, but it seemed to dissolve beneath her touch. Then Nessay died.

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