Sight

OneIt is a wide-sky darkness, made pale by a full moon rising, the desert sand reflecting its glow. We follow a dirt road, our headlights devouring the tracks we made just hours ago, when there was still daylight, and hope. In every direction the desert and the night sky are following in each other's footsteps, pushing farther and farther into the empty distance until their edges press together at the horizon.In my troubled half sleep the rocking of the truck makes me dream that we are a bird and the desert plains are our wings. We are soaring, and we are falling. I jerk myself awake before we hit the ground. Deputy Pesquera, in the driver's seat, glances over at me. Her uniform presses, limp and wrinkled, against her large frame; the carefully ironed creases of the uniform sweat loose in the cramped and airless interview room back in Salvation."It takes a lot out of you, doesn't it, Dylan?" she asks, straightening her back in a stretch that brushes the top of her head against the truck's roof. Her sheriff department hat lies in the backseat. Mom says Deputy Pesquera is big boned. My friend Frank says she's the best-looking linebacker he's ever seen.I turn around in my seat and look through the back window, beyond the washed-out red of our taillights and down the road disappearing into the darkness behind us. Far in the distance I see the bare-bulbed lights of the low and wind-worn cement buildings that make up Salvation's town center.We took the back route off Pine Mountain to get there, slowly winding our way down the little-used road, flanked by slopes of dry dirt and rock, instead of the thick groves of trees that cover the front side of the mountain. Rounding each blind corner, Deputy Pesquera would honk, warning anyone coming the other way to move back to their side of the narrow road. We stopped about halfway down the mountain, in Baker's Creek, the tiny town that's built into the only grove of scraggly trees on the back side of the mountain.There's no creek. The place is named for an old mountain guy named Baker, who fought with the county to have a water supply put in. I stayed in the truck when the deputy went into Sheboa's new grocery store. They used to have a store up on our side of the mountain, right in the center of the village, but Mr. Sheboa said he got tired of the new Village Business Association making up rules he didn't want to follow, rules that only made things better for the flatlanders that clogged up the mountain on weekends. I kept the hood of my black sweatshirt up while I waited in the truck, even though there was no hint of the late fall chill I'd felt while I waited for the bus this morning. I pulled the strings on either side of the hood and cinched the face opening as small as it would go, until all sound was muffled and only the very edge of daylight could press against my closed eyes.The thing about visions is, they hurt.Darkness helps. It keeps the light from slicing behind the whites of my eyes and poking at the sore spot in my brain, the spot where, as I sat sweating outside Sheboa's grocery store, a flicking, pulsing picture showed itself to me again and again and again.The good thing is, I was already sitting down when the vision first hit. There wasn't a long way to fall. In the vision I was in the desert, and it was dark. There was a hole dug in the sand in front of me, and a blue plastic barrel beside it. I was looking into the barrel. There was a girl inside, maybe ten years old. She looked up at me. There was black dirt caked at the corners of her mouth, and when she reached up for me, I saw her knuckles were bruised and torn. She'd fought.When I came to, lying on the floor of the girls' bathroom, I saw three pairs of feet standing by the stall door. My friend Pilar, in black Converse high-tops like mine, peeked under the door first, holding her long braid to keep it from touching the floor. "Dude," she said, "did you just fall off the can?" TheVrettos, Adrienne Maria is the author of 'Sight', published 2008 under ISBN 9781416906582 and ISBN 1416906584.