Page 8 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
Behind her, something moved.
She turned and saw a figure watching from the ridge.
A woman. Barefoot. Glowing.
At first Nora thought it was her own reflection, echoed in the shimmer of the air. But this woman’s eyes were hollow. Her mouth was open too, but her throat pulsed, choking on sand.
Then the woman spoke, not with her voice, but with dust.
“She did not wait.”
Then she crumbled.
Like a statue left too long in the wind. First her hands, then her hips, then her chest collapsing in on itself. Her veins turned to cracks, and her eyes to smoke.
The world shook.
He reached for her.
She tried to scream.
***
Nora jolted upright, gasping.
The room was dark. Cold. Her skin was damp with sweat, but her mouth was bone dry.
She could still feel it. His gaze. The heat. The ache.
And worse, she could still feel the burn in her skin, the image of her own body glowing wrong.
She sat there for a moment, hand pressed to her chest. Waiting for it to fade.
It didn’t.
She whispered aloud, just to ground herself. “It’s just a dream.”
But her throat felt full of dust.
She turned on the lamp. Reached for her journal. Wrote with a trembling hand:
She did not wait. She did not become.
Then paused. Underlined it.
Her pulse still hadn’t steadied.
She didn’t know what any of it meant. But part of her felt like the dream hadn’t just shown her something. It had warned her.
Then came a sound. A thump. Something hitting the porch.
Her pulse kicked up as she crept to the window. She nudged the curtain just enough to peer out. Nothing. Just sand and shadows.
Her skin prickled, that same awareness from the dream lingering like a second heartbeat. She backed away from the window, telling herself it was just the wind.
But the air felt thick, tense, like something was waiting just beyond her line of sight.
She whispered to herself, just loud enough to break the silence, “It’s just the wind.”
