The letters came from a cell in California, one after the other in a steady stream, postmarked from the prisons that changed as he was transferred. Sometimes Melody imagined him in an old-fashioned striped prisoner’s jumpsuit, standing on the side of the road, part of a chain gang, digging a drainage ditch while the warden smoked a cigarette. She’d pass him by in her convertible, her scarf waving in the wind like some movie star, and she would make damn sure not to look back.
She never answered the letters, but she never stopped him from sending them either. Her address made her feel vulnerable, but also somehow more real. Here I am, X marks the spot.
Arizona was Melody’s home now, far away from the Central Valley, but just as hot. Every morning she walked along the dusty arroyo that ran from her small apartment out to the border of the desert. Cacti marked her path, lizards and snakes skittered out of her way as she strode through the deep, pockmarked ravine.
“You ought not to walk down there,” her neighbor warned. “In a summer storm, the gulleys’ll fill up real quick and you’ll get washed away right along with everything else. Where are you walking to anyways?”
Undeterred, she continued to walk early in the mornings, sometimes in her nightdress and always in a pair of old boots. When she could no longer see her apartment building and could focus instead on the blue and red striations scratched along the sides of the desert’s mesas, only then did she feel like she could breathe.
The arroyo coughed dust at her when the warm southern winds kicked up in the afternoon. Melody wiped at her eyes, drank from her water bottle, and picked up rocks, sometimes she even found fossils. She took them home and set them up along her windowsill like a border of protection. She hung a gas station dream catcher over her bed.
Are you there? Are you dead? he wrote.
She came across a half eaten carcass in the middle of the arroyo one morning. The creature looked pitiful, patches of fur missing, and the empty eye sockets staring straight into the sun were filled with a host of buzzing flies that seemed far too loud for the early morning calm. She couldn’t be sure what the creature had previously been, mammalian, and certainly satisfactory food for the coyotes and buzzards. Melody stepped over it, her nightdress skimming the dead thing, and kept walking. Later, she’d wonder where the smell of rot permeating her apartment was originating from.
Are you dead?
The letters always went into a box under her bed. She’d find them laying in the red desert dust outside her door when she got home from walking. A shadow of emptiness remained on the concrete when she finally picked them up, like the blown out hands painted on the walls of caves by prehistoric artists. But impermanent, Melody reminded herself, as she dragged her foot through the dust, obscuring any discernible form.
She worked night shifts at a truck stop diner, so it was always slow and she mostly served the tweaked out truckers on forty-eight-hour hauls and a variety of people who were generally down on their luck. Like me, she thought.
Her manager asked Melody to make sure the coffee was strong, so she put two scoops in the machines and poured black ichor into waiting ceramic mugs with the diner’s owl logo stamped on the front. The mugs were often still stained brown from nights prior, coffee grounds settled into the craze lines, creating a new glaze. No one ever complained though, they just drank it black and blotted their lipstick as they sipped, leaving their own mark behind on the rim. But impermanent, she thought as she wiped Revlon ‘Ravish Me Red’ from the mug’s lip.
I miss your kiss.
She came home from her shift at the diner, eyes red and blood shivering from drinking nothing but free coffee for eight hours. She washed her face and changed clothes. Her diaphanous nightdress clung to her body where the sweat pooled at her lower back, between her breasts, the stains there were yellowed despite constant washing.
The sound of the diner’s buzzing neon sign, ‘24/7’ glowing in bright red behind her eyes, and softly clinking mugs on vinyl tabletops, the occasional cough, a snore, it all took a while to leave her. So, she walked.
The sun rose slowly in the east, illuminating one rock at a time like it was peeling back a bandage until eventually, the light reached the mesas in a blinding crescendo. The desert sun had also bleached the dead animal’s bones swiftly and, over the passing weeks, Melody surveyed the decay—the flies that turned to worms that turned to dust. She passed its burial spot this morning, dispassionately observing the exposed rib bones. Her hiking boots were caked now in weeks of red dust, sometimes she imagined her lungs were coated in the same way. This early in the morning, the snakes were still sleeping, and she walked with confidence down the ravine, filling her pockets with stones.
The air smelled different that morning, metallic, like pennies in her mouth. A crack of lightning broke through the morning sunrise, heralding a grey thundercloud that rolled in from over the mesa. Melody looked up quickly, too quickly, and fell down toward the earth, her hands finding slim purchase on an unfriendly cactus plant.
Sitting in her torn nightdress, at the bottom of a nameless arroyo, wiping her bloodied hands carelessly on the white fabric, Melody opened her mouth to taste the first drops of summer rain.
Later, when the neighbor finally reported her missing, the cops found only the nightdress hanging from a rock outcropping, as though it had been carelessly tossed there. The bloodstains were still fresh, bright red. They never found her body but marked it an accidental death.
“The desert is full of ghosts,” they told each other, “built on bones.”
Eventually, the letters stopped coming and the red dust piled up in small untended mounds by the door.
Abigail Stewart is a fiction writer from Berkeley, California. Her work has appeared in Maudlin House, XRAY Literary Magazine, Corvid Queen, and others. Her debut novel, The Drowned Women, is coming out from Whiskey Tit Books in November 2021.
