He walked because there was nothing else. The sand took his shoes in the second year and his name sometime after that. He could not say when. A man does not notice the moment he becomes no one.

The sun was a white nail driven through the skull of heaven and it did not move and it did not care. He drank from stones where water gathered in the mornings like small mercies left by a god too tired to do more. He ate what moved slow enough to catch and some things that did not move at all.

In the fifth year he talked to the bones of a mule half buried in a wash. He told it about his father. He told it about a woman whose hair smelled of rain. The mule’s jaw was open as if it had died mid-sentence and he thought that was about right. Everything worth saying got cut short.

He lost count of the years by their number but kept them by what they took. The year of his back teeth. The year of his left eye going milky. The year he forgot the word for green.

There were nights he lay flat against the cooling hardpan and felt the earth turning beneath him like a wheel on a broken axle and he understood that he was cargo. That he was being carried somewhere he had not agreed to go.

In what he later reckoned was the fifteenth year he came to a ridge of black rock and below it a valley where thin grass grew and a creek ran over red stones and he fell to his knees not from exhaustion but from something else. Something worse. He wept and could not stop.

Because he saw it. That every step had been the only step. That the desert had not been between him and this place but rather the way to it. The single way. That a man cannot arrive at the place he is meant to be except by the road that brings him and the road is always long and the road is always fire.

He put his hands in the water. He watched them shake. Ordinary hands. An ordinary creek. Ordinary ordinary ordinary light falling on the stones like it had fallen every day he was not there to see it.

He drank and it was sweet and he understood that it had always been sweet. That it had been running here through all his years of thirst. Patient as scripture. Waiting like a promise made before he was born to no one who would remember it except the water itself and the red stones and the ordinary light.

He stood. He walked down into the valley. He did not look back. There was nothing behind him that was not also ahead.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​