Very Short Story 2

No matter how much she thought about it, Jessica couldn’t seem to figure out the state. She walked everywhere. Trying to gather herself together. Trying to find her bearings. She didn’t know people and she didn’t know how to fit herself in between them anyway.

New Mexico, the land of enchantment. She wasn’t enchanted. Gone were the fairies and playthings of her imagination. They had dried up from the sheer power of the sun. Her childhood was over now. She needed to find a job, and find one fast. Her money was disappearing just like her visions of dancing goblins and flower headdresses. As a child Jessica had fantasized about New Mexico. Finding her Mother, finding her happily Ever After. She groaned. It was so hot here. Gone also were her imaginings of dancing Native American princess who would welcome her into their tribes and keep her safely as their sister. They were replaced by hippie beggar boys and drunken aging men.

Jessica passed a middle aged man who had tattoos covering his pale face. She couldn’t decipher his expression thanks to the bluish lines that seemed to shelter his emotions from the cruel world he lived in. She stared and she stared at his innocent, but gruesomely non-human-like face. It held a map. She knew it just by looking. She memorized the right turns, the left turns. She counted paces in between distances and held her breath as she followed the tracks directly into his eyes. Startled by their intensity she turned and walked away from him. But she still remembered and she still followed his path. She wandered and she turned exactly as he had expressed to her. She gazed down alleyways and into the faces of the abandoned. She knew she was not alone. As she walked she hummed to herself.

At the end of her path she found a solitary ­­gladiolus flower. She picked it and turned to her left, where the tattooed man was waiting for her. She placed the sword-like blossom in his left hand while reaching for his right with her left. They turned together, in sync, and began their eternal walk through the desert and into the sunset.