Night in the White Desert
Zoe Carver
Whale bones litter this desert. Whale bones and blacked shells and ancient shards of limestone, once parts of mountains that have been reduced to rock by that cool, directionless gale. The north wind can trick you out here in the sand. The only truth comes at dark, under the winking north star.
It feels wrong to be a body against this ancient nothingness. It feels wrong to drink water from plastic bottles; water trapped from a spring on another world, bottled in a factory on a third world entirely.
Who are you against the sand? The eyes of the desert fox ask, black pearls hidden in this sea of white.
I am a person in a way you are not, is the common response to the desert fox. I come from people who once walked this desert, then walked far far away.
The fox laughs at your answer, an answer echoed over the cascading dunes by a millennium of voices. The fox remembers when the desert wasn’t a desert. The fox has eyes as old as stone.
To keep walking north, you must glance at the stars. But the fox knows north and knows south and knows east. The fox knows how bodies come to this desert, how they drink from their plastic bottles and eat from the trunks of their cars, which tear across the sand in a smoky cloud of exhaust and yesterday’s top hits. The fox knows the city which leaves its imprint on the desert, despite its distance, which blows in bottle caps and candy wrappers and strangers looking to stay the night. The fox knows you, stranger, and how you look at the whale bones with wonder and greed. The fox knows the whale bones; the fox knew the whales, back when this desert wasn’t a desert at all, when the sand was a seafloor and the shards of calcium and limestone were part of rolling, windswept waves.
One day, when this desert is once again not a desert, when you are made of bones that the whales will stare at in wonder and greed, the fox will know you too.
Zoe Carver is an emerging writer with works appearing in
the New English Review, Foofaraw Press, and Ouch
Collective. She is originally from Portland, Oregon, and
studied International Affairs and Creative Writing at George
Washington University. She was awarded the Julian Clement
Chase Writing in Washington Award, and is currently on a
journalism fellowship at the American University in
Cairo, Egypt. She likes Earl Grey tea, biking, and telling
people she used to work on a goat farm, which is only semi-
true.
