Thermon

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Written by Priscilla Wong

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They moved like flowers in the desert wind, these girls with skin like coffee left too long in the sun. Allah's children, they called them Fatah and Shabah, their voices carrying across the streets like birds that never tire of their own songs. And when they laughed, it was as though the very earth had forgotten its own solemnity, even as their elders cast skyward glances, pleading for quiet in a world that had forgotten how to whisper.

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And there were the boys, wearing their skin like burnished copper and autumn beets, proud as young roosters at dawn. Knights and Samurai, they named themselves, though their mothers still called them habibi when they thought no one could hear. Yowai, they scattered like seeds in a storm, their bravado carried away on the same winds that brought the evening call to prayer.

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The rider's folly.

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The mare's flanks heaved beneath him like the last gasps of a bellows, but still he drove her on. Each dawn found them moving, each dusk saw them pause only long enough for the horse to crop thin grass while he dozed in the saddle. The sun burned paths across the sky and the moon traced silver arcs above them, and still they rode.

 

He had forgotten the feel of earth beneath his boots. His legs, once thick with muscle, had withered to rope-thin stalks wrapped around the horse's barrel. When he slept, his dreams were of endless motion, of hoofbeats drumming against packed dirt, of wind washing over him like river water.

 

Then came the morning when the mare's heart gave out. She dropped beneath him like a stone falling into still water, no warning, no farewell. Just the sudden absence of movement, of life. He sprawled in the dust beside her, and for the first time in years, felt the ground press against his bones.

 

His legs wouldn't hold him. They were useless things now, shrunken and weak as a newborn. He had driven his faithful companion to death, and in doing so, had killed something in himself. The earth seemed to mock him as he crawled beside the mare's cooling body, remembering too late that man was meant to walk upon his own two feet.