Brisbane nights were for silk pyjamas and champagne. Not sand. But I’d made a bet with Jonesy that I’d survive a week without servants, here I was — coughing dust and realizing too late that Jonesy was a bastard. Worse, he was a bastard working for the other side. Thirteen dollars. That was all it took to trade my dignity for dust.

I woke up with sand in my mouth. Gritty. Dry. It pooled in my mouth, a dry confession and pressed against my gums like a dull knife. I spat, but it only made room for more. Had I been here all along? No. I had been in bed, hadn’t I?

Satin sheets.
A feather pillow.
The cool breath of night licking at my ankles.

But the sheets had turned to sand. And my ankles were sinking. I could reason my way out of most things. This was not one of them. The last thing I remembered was — Number 12 Brisbane Street had been ordinary — until the sand came. It seeped through the floorboards at midnight, swallowing the Persian rug, the four-poster bed and the snores of Aunt Marjorie. By dawn, only my head remained above the dunes. Accidental magic, the Ministry would call it. I called it poetic justice. I endeavoured to sit up. The desert did not allow it. Instead, it wrapped its fingers around my limbs. I blinked, but it was agony. Grains of sand scraped against my eyelids; crystallising my lashes into filaments of glass.

The sun blazed notes of dehydration. When it kissed my forehead, my sweat didn’t vanish; it pooled into a silvery puddle at my feet — reflecting a face that wasn’t mine. A face with too many eyes. My blonde hair had unspooled into a nest of frayed ropes. Each strand was threaded with small beetles that skittered towards my scalp, burrowing into the soft meat of memory. The beetles’ legs prickled like the ghost of tiny fingers — a sensation I’d felt once before, months ago, in a room with white walls and a screen dancing with static. My blue dress flapped against my skin. Was it blue before? Hadn’t it been white?

I looked down. My feet were half-buried in the grains. My sandals were barely recognisable. They had grown teeth. The straps gnawed at my ankles while the soles repeated an admonition: Run, run, run — in the voice of Aunt Marjorie, who once fled a war nobody remembered. The sun was both a lover and a torturer. It kissed my flesh with a burning merciless kiss. Sweat rose, but the heat stole it before it could fall.

A tree. No — a house. No — nothing at all.

The wind carried suggestions of other places and times. A nursery door ajar. A mobile spinning silent in a draft. My lips splintered with the effort of remembering. I pushed myself up and squinted into the distance. Then, I saw a shoe, half-buried in the sand. The leather was peeled by the sun and scoured by a thousand storms. My eyes traced its shape, slow to stitch its story. It wasn’t mine. That was all I knew. I reached down, picked it up, and shook out the sand that had claimed it as its own. Had it ever been worn? Had I ever walked?

The wind carried a whiff of smoke — so faint I could have imagined it. I turned, searching the dunes. No sign of life. Just the golden wasteland masquerading as a paradise. Then, a shadow crept across the sand. I looked up and saw a vulture soaring through the skies. It circled. Once. Twice. Then disappeared into the burning light of the sun. The dunes felt erratic. They rose and fell like a message written by something too large to care. Perhaps it was only my imagination. But the desert had no concern for my survival. It had devoured countless souls before me and I would be no different.

I stood. Or at least, I thought I did. My body was disobedient — sinking when it should have risen, folding when it should have stretched. I forced my legs forward. I saw water rippling in the heat and began to walk towards it. The sand crunched underfoot, brittle as old bones. My throat burned with every breath and my lips sagged under the weight of thirst. The farther I walked, the farther the water seemed to slip away. “Just a little more,” I said. “Come on, just a little more.” I looked down, expecting to see the story of my struggle written in the grains. A record of my journey. A sign that I had been here. No footprints. None. I turned back, frantic for any proof of my existence, but all I saw was more sand. Had I been obliviated? The sand bit back. The heat chewed at my bones. I stumbled but I didn’t fall. There was no ground, no sky — only the vast yawning mouth of the desert. And then—

A figure materialized. Standing on the dune. Backlit by the cruel white sun. Watching me. Waiting.

Of course, it was Ryan. He hadn’t changed. Ryan, or his ghost, wore a shirt as dark as a window’s pact, blue eyes — the same twitched half-smile that once meant something — what? Desire? Deception? His hands hovered near my waist as if afraid to touch a wound long healed. You don’t touch a scar. Not even when you put it there.
“Catherine,” he said. I tasted my name in his mouth. Dry and foreign like something forgotten in an attic.
“Ryan,” I gasped, more relieved than I wanted to admit. “Where are we?”
“You’re lost,” he said, offering that half-smile of his that once drove me wild. “Follow me. There’s water ahead. It’ll help.” I hesitated. I didn’t trust him but I trusted the sand and the sun even less. What choice did I have?
“How did we get here?” I asked.
“Does it matter?” he answered, glancing back with a look that was part amusement, part sorrow. “We’re here together. That’s what matters.”

We walked. Or floated. Or swam through the dunes — who could tell? The sky budged from blistering gold to the deep belly of dusk. The mirage did not move. Yet somehow we reached it. Water licked the shore like a stray cat. I knelt by its edge and cupped a measure to my lips. It was cool and refreshing — like air to a drowning soul. It was real. Wasn’t it?

Ryan watched. Arms crossed with a smirk flickering on his lips. “Better?” he asked.
I nodded. “Much better,” I said, wiping my lips and exhaling a breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding.
“Good,” he said, standing and offering his hand. “Stay close. We need to climb to the top of the dunes. It’s the only way out.” I took his hand and together, we began to climb. The higher we went, the more the world slipped out of focus. The wind whistled through the dunes yet everything felt muffled. When we reached the dunes peak, Ryan pointed into the distance. “Look,” he said. I followed his gaze — and saw them.

Footprints.
Mine.

They curled into a vortex of teeth — circling back to where I started. The shoe I had been clutching dropped from my hand and sank into the sand as though it had never existed. I swallowed a scream. “What is this?” Ryan didn’t answer. He stood, staring at the horizon. His face was unreadable. The line of his jaw was taut and his black beard shifted with the wind. He didn’t turn to look at me, didn’t offer an explanation, didn’t move. The wind howled. It sounded like laughter. It sounded like weeping. I reached for him, grasping his arm.
“Ryan?” I muttered. “What’s happening?” The wind pranced like a drunken fool. It swept the sand and devoured my steps. I thought of screaming. Of running. But the desert was an old miser. It offered nothing to anyone who dared to wander its sands.

Ryan stepped forward and before he could speak, I grabbed his arm, “What is this? What’s happening?”
He hugged me and mused, “I love you, Catherine. Take care of our baby.”
My body flinched, “Our what?”
He was already moving. Already fading into the belly of the dunes. I ran before I could think. Chasing the footprints he had left behind. But the sands licked them clean before I could claim them. I stopped, panting under the setting sun. When my foot nudged a bottle with a paper inside. Half-buried in the dunes. I picked it up and pulled out the note; scrawled in Ryan’s handwriting: Not all mirages are lies.

The vulture returned. Not as a bird but as a hovering mirage. Its shadow birthing replicas of myself. I walked again. My legs shed skin like parchment; revealing bones of petrified wood. The sun split into twins. Then triplets. Its light carving my shadow into a map of absences. When I screamed, the dunes echoed back a song. It sang back in a voice that was mine and too small to survive the wind. The song led me to a shack, half-buried like the bottle. Inside, Jonesy sat peeling an orange.
“Took you long enough.” His hands were sandpaper. I laughed, though my throat bled. Later, I’d learn he’d died weeks ago. But the orange was real. Sweet enough to forgive the sun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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