The desert doesn't lie. But it does hum.
A low, scratchy sound—just beneath hearing—like breath drawn through sun-cracked teeth or an old man sighing into a clay jug.
I walked with no real aim—just enough motion to fool myself into thinking I had one.
The sand curled around my boots like it was trying to read my footprints before they vanished.
Rude, really. I didn't even get to finish the story.
Swirls in the dunes. Swirls in the stone.
Shapes that meant nothing and everything, like a language the world forgot but the wind keeps reciting out of spite.
That's when I remembered her.
The cartographer with no eyes.
A blind woman who made maps from birdsong and temperature. I helped her finish her "world," and she died before the final coastline was drawn.
I forget her name, but I carry the map still. Which is unfair, really—I've forgotten people with names.
She was blind when I met her.
Not the fumbling kind. She didn't bump into things. Her hands knew where the ink was, where the pressed reeds were softest, where the wind touched the edge of the page like a god thinking out loud.
She didn't draw what she saw. She drew what the world _whispered_.
Frankly, I found it a little unsettling. But also endearing, like a thunderstorm that apologizes afterward.
Her hut was full of scrolls.
They hung from the ceiling like molting skin. The floor creaked under parchment and poor decisions. There were maps of rivers that didn't exist yet. Cities too large for the era. She'd named mountains before the locals figured out how to name fire.
I asked her once, "How do you know where the world ends?"
She smiled, ink on her teeth like a priestess of very specific sins.
"It doesn't end," she said. "It forgets itself."
She asked me to describe the stars. I told her about the twin moons and the third one that hides like it owes someone money.
She nodded and marked them: a little triangle in the sky, always shifting, like a drunk trying to dance on a sloped roof.
She never used straight lines. Said the world was never straight. Only people tried to make it that way.
I chose not to take offense.
Children came to her with stones. Bits of bone. Hair braided in patterns that meant something once. She'd weigh them, sniff them (yes, really), and point to a spot on her map. "This is where it comes from. Or where it wants to go."
A woman brought her a tooth once. Too long. Too curved. Too old.
She handed her a folded scrap that read:
"Below the river that used to dream."
No further explanation.
The woman left like that sentence made perfect sense.
She never asked for coin. Just stories. And names.
I gave her my name.
She forgot it the next day.
Fair trade, really.
One evening, I watched her trace a line across fresh paper. Her fingers trembled like the page owed her an apology.
"This is a border," she whispered.
"Between what?" I asked.
"Hope and memory."
I didn't ask for directions.
She had a trinket I envied—a single bead, carved with symbols too worn to read. Said it had been given to her by a sand-breather. A girl with lungs full of heat and prophecy. The bead would roll away if she ever lied on a map.
It never moved.
I tested it once. Moved it with my finger.
She threw ink at me.
She died in the rain.
Sitting up. Brush in hand.
Final map half-drawn: a single curve and a spiral like a question left mid-sentence.
I buried her in the hut. Let the scrolls rot around her like wilted prayers. The birds came. The wind scattered ink into the soil.
I kept the bead.
It never rolled.
The dunes shifted again. One rose higher than the rest, caught the sun, and held it like a secret.
I climbed without thinking, which is honestly how most of my worst decisions begin.
At the top, a spiral etched into the stone. Old. Weather-bitten.
No footprints. No offerings. Just a single red feather, pressed flat by time and indifference.
I sat beside it.
Didn't speak. Didn't move.
Just listened.
And—for a moment—the desert answered.
A few more days of travel and the desert began to green like it remembered plants were a thing.
I passed through a canyon—could've been the same one or a different one pretending—when the memories came crawling back.
The boy had dust in his teeth and sunlight in his voice.
He called himself Oren, though I doubt that was his real name. He was small, wiry, and wielded a hammer too big for someone who still skipped when excited.
He chipped words into stone like they were secrets trying to escape through the cracks.
"Why do you do it?" I asked.
He didn't look up. "The rocks remember."
Oren said the earth had a voice. A lonely one. And if you carved poems deep enough, the stones would sing them back someday.
Not now—later. Maybe in a hundred years. Maybe never.
"But I'll be listening," he said. Grinning.
I didn't have the heart to tell him rocks aren't great conversationalists.
The canyon was narrow. Made for echoes, ghosts, and regret.
He carved into cliff faces, fallen boulders, even pebbles he left like breadcrumbs for a future that probably wouldn't care.
His verses were short. Strange.
One I remember:
Sky is a lid.
I want holes in the lid.
Let the stars leak through.
Another:
If I forget your face,
Will the dust remember?
It rhymed better in his voice.
I gave him food once. He gave me a pebble with a single word: "Listen."
I carried it for decades. Lost it in a river during what I can only describe as a "naked diplomacy incident." Don't ask.
Years passed. Centuries maybe. The canyon changed names. Trees along the rim burned, grew back, burned again.
A cycle, like everything.
I returned—not to find him. Just to wander.
No one remembered Oren. His carvings were gone.
Worn smooth by time, buried under landslides, swallowed by silence.
I started to think I'd imagined him.
Wouldn't be the first time.
Then, at dusk, the wind shifted through the ravine.
A low hum. No words. Just rhythm. Breath in stone.
And once—just once—beneath the rustle of dying sun…
Let the stars leak through.
Clear. Soft. Like a child whispering inside a cathedral too large for the gods that built it.
I left a verse of my own, scratched into a shale slab with a nail I probably wasn't supposed to have:
He sang first.
I heard last.
That's enough.
I don't say anything.
I just listen.