by Betty Stanton
The wind carries the taste of ash, not rain. It coats the tongue, a dry promise that never breaks. The road ahead fades into a mirage of warped air, shimmering pools that vanish when we get close. The asphalt peels like burned skin but we keep walking because to stop is to remember.
Every night we mark the map again. Those lines that used to be rivers are scars now, blue lines on the map that we watch fading into nothing. Mary traces them anyway, murmuring their names like prayers: Cimarron, Washita, Arkansas. I can’t tell if she’s trying to remember them or if she’s hoping to make them real again.
In the early morning hours before dawn, our footprints fill with water. Thin films, clear and trembling, as if the earth itself were sweating. We drink it. We know we shouldn’t, but thirst has no memory. It tastes like metal, like the film coating our teeth. By sunrise the dew is gone. It leaves the prints darker than our blood.
Behind us, the cities have gone silent. They weren’t destroyed. They just folded. Towers sagging inward, glass curving until it swallowed the light. You can feel them breathing through the dust, patient, like creatures waiting to be called back.
There are still stars, but they don’t drift the right way. Some nights they rearrange into the old rivers we used to cross. Once we thought they formed the shape of a woman kneeling near the water, her hands cupped. The next night she was gone, and we could hear something moving beneath the sandbars.
Mary says she thinks the world is dreaming itself closed, sealing what’s been left here beneath a crust of salt like our grandmother would have. I tell her maybe the world is thirsty too. Maybe it drinks us one by one, to remember what water felt like.
When Mary dies, she doesn’t fall. She just stills, eyes open, mouth dry, staring toward a mirage that doesn’t fade. I pour the last of our water on her lips and it vanishes before it touches her tongue.
By morning her footprints are full again: clear, trembling, too bright. I kneel and drink what’s left of her, and for a moment I swear I can taste the rain. Then the ground shifts beneath my feet and I forget where the road is going.
The map folds in my hands until all that’s left is blue.
Betty Stanton (she/her) is a Pushcart nominated writer who lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals and collections and has been included in various anthologies. She is currently on the editorial board of Ivo Review. @fadingbetty.bsky.social
A-minor 