Diamondback

Black sand. Nothing but black sand as far as the heat would show me; black sand and trees that looked like busted umbrellas with the roofs blown out. That’s what I saw each day it got light enough and I opened up my eyes to see where I’d gotten to. Black sand, busted umbrellas and a white-hot sky no bird could fly in.
It was a lot like a dream, gone past the wondering and the cursing and the hoping. Gone past the point of no return and the pointless wishing it weren’t me out in the middle of it all.
Black, black sand. White, white sky. Every which way the wrong way.
“You gonna bite me?” I asked a rattler one day. “You gonna kill me?” I said. “Better hurry.”
One time when I was a kid they put bandages on my eyes and kept me in a room that didn’t smell like nothing for a month. They told me it was a month but it could have been a year or a day — nothing to hear ‘cept my own sounds, nothing to see ‘cept them specks and swirls that go round inside your eyes.
Round and round they went with me watching them — talking to them, just like I talked to that rattler, curled up out of the sun under that god-damned umbrella tree. Black, black days lined up one after another with nothing to talk to ‘cept those specks and swirls.
“It’s for your own good.” That’s what they’d say. You drink their sticky-sweet medicine, you learn their sickly lessons then they put you in a room and bind your eyes with bandages and gauze.
All for your own good. Black sand, busted umbrellas, white hot sky and rattlers, telling you you’re going the wrong way.