One Man's Desert Is Another Man's Dessert
Nothing much mattered to the denizen of the inner desert. He didn’t look for anything, for it all found its way to him. When it rained he opened his mouth. When an animal died in its tracks he’d come upon it and eat it. When he needed shade he reached an oasis. His name was written on the wind and forgotten by those who once knew it. He did not know what he knew, and he knew that.
He was standing on the crest of a large sand dune, preparing to ski down to the bottom of its bowl, when a bird began to spiral above him in the blue sky, slowly descending towards him. He squinted, watching the bird get closer and closer. He didn’t think about what the bird might be doing. He didn’t care, so he began skiing down the dune, his bare feet gliding and swishing as he picked up speed. The sand began to gather behind him, until it overtook him and his arms and legs became trapped in the heavy weight of the sand. Only his head was visible, sticking up out of the ribbed, reddish grains.
His sweaty face was plastered with the desert dust. He spat out the sand that had found its way into his mouth. Beyond that he thought nothing of his predicament. “Qué sera,” he would have thought had he known French, or actually cared.
He casually glanced upward and saw the bird swooping to within three feet of his protruding head. It bounced forward, cocking its head this way and then that way. It leaned so close its beak was almost touching the man’s nose. “Beep,” it said. The man said nothing. “Beep,” the bird said again. The man only looked into the bird’s glimmering eyes.
Time passed, nothing else. Eventually the bird bounced up onto the man’s head. It considered its new vantage point. It had never stood on a living man’s head before. It was becoming hungry. The man didn’t know how thirsty he was. The man was dying and he didn’t know this either. “Beep,” the bird said.
“Beep,” the man said back. “Beep-beep-beep-bu-beep-bu-beep,” he concluded.
The bird seemed moved by what the man had just shared, so it jumped off from its perch on the man’s head and began digging around him. After a few hours, the bird was able to uncover the man up to his shoulders, and the man was then capable of squirming, first, one arm free and then the other. He climbed himself out of what had been his certain earthen grave. The bird bounced onto the man’s resting leg.
The man reached out, grabbed the bird, bit off its head, tipped it up and calmly drank its blood. Sated, he picked the bird’s head from off the sand’s surface, gazed into its dead eyes, and said, “Stupid bird, don’t you know sarcasm when you hear it?”