In the scorching heat, few things can be found.

The rare winds that blow hot air across cracked soil only pick up dust that settles shortly after.

In the sweltering heat, the horizon glitters with promises it will not keep. The panorama flickers, dances like a flame caught in the breeze.

Sometimes there are remnants that lie somewhere. Skeletons perhaps, though it is unclear whether whatever it is, whatever it once was, was really alive.

Their shell glitters in every color imaginable though mostly they are brown and rough. They soak up the heat and release it in small undulations all around them.

Most are hollow and exposed to the sun but some have kept the outside more complete and the partial shade found inside the carcass offers the pathetic shelter to the last plants to be found here; small coarse green fighters, sweating from every leaf.

But though they seem small, they might be the biggest living thing around. Who knows how deep their roots reach, how much land they cover, and what lives with them deep in the dark? So, step carefully.

At night, cracked, brittle soil becomes hard as a rock, glittering under the moonlight’s gaze from a million frozen crystals.

Nature holds her breath- one day the sun might not come back.

Against constellations, hidden if not for the stars it swallows up, the house of what can only be something monstrous stands still. Jagged edges cut galaxies apart, the rotten flesh long before haven fed a creature now extinct left only the decomposed claws and the deep, deep tunnels they have dug.

Don’t look too long into the dark, or it will look back.

At sunrise, the world burns crimson red, dripping down the sky over the land. It pours gold over endless plains, but you can’t live of metal.

It is then when silver turns to vapor as it touches molten sunlight that you can hear them.

The sound is deafening, cries by the thousands casting no shadow. It starts off slow until it’s a tremendous chorus, shattering the silence with brutal efficiency.

In the noise, other things come to life. They move carefully around whatever they can find that offers shelter, only casting their image: long legs thin as twigs, reaching sky high, ears pointed and sharp knives, snout long and twisting.

It is unclear if it is the shadow or the beast itself, but when it is near, it”s best not to stay and find out.

There is a place, the awning of a forest. The ground is moss and if you stand on it too long it will swallow you whole. It gives and gives under the steps taken on it, one day it will take back.

Its green is almost fluorescent- radioactive vomit, under perpetually gray skies. If light were to hit it unfiltered, it might burst into flames.

The horizon is a bare line traced with a shaky hand. Slowly a small pine tree, ankle-high but dark green, sprouts out of the ground, a lonely watcher. It will tell the others it saw you pass.

Carefully, like fate strings along lives, more of them start appearing. First, they are alone but soon enough they conspire. The clusters get larger, reaching up to your knee now.

In front of you, the horizon stays straight but turns dark and dense.

The pine trees are growing taller now, they reach your hip, soon enough their branches reach towards your chest until they finally cover your head.

You now are inside.

Eliza Sack