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The desert can play tricks on you, on your eyes, ears, my wife said, and yet, distinctly, she heard yipping. She asked me if I remembered Sadie. Those photos of me at the lake, she said, you told me when I was ten I was a shoelace. Now I remembered; Sadie is the golden retriever in the pictures. There's one of them on a dock, of my wife's small arms, sun-soaked and strung about that dog, hands knotted in front, and raising the skin of the lake is a ring where just before a fish rolled the mirrored surface. It was Sadie, my wife said, there in the desert.

Sadie?

We can stop this anytime, she said, I know what I saw.

I believe you, I said. Please, go on.

She said she turned, caught a flash of tail flitting through the rocks and hurried after it, away from the outpost. Instinct told her to. And while she couldn't be certain, she said the dust stirred where something went, so she clamored down a crumbling ridge to sandy pitch, searched for prints, and finding none, faced the outpost, which appeared as a diorama before a curtain of purple sky. A diminutive Corporeal Brand traced across the foreground. Midway, he stopped. He pivoted on his heels, slammed his gunstock into his shoulder and drew a bead on my wife. When he raised his left arm, waved, my wife waved back. Sharper than most, she said.

And then came the big light.

It started somewhere behind Corporeal Brand, as a sprig of flame on the far side of outpost. It streaked fast. It towered and threw streamers, almost pretty-like, like a jet being fired, consuming the roofline, the corporeal, and a Boom-Whoosh that boiled alive the sand beneath her and echoed down the valley. A spray of earth rained as my wife lay coiled, clinging to the dim hope she, too, wouldn't be boiled away in the big light. In the Boom-Whoosh of heat and debris and hardened air.

And then, just as sudden, a silence.

When a cool blew in, my wife moved her hands. She said she used them to touch her face. She touched her neck, almost shaping it, she said, walked the fluttering slope of it down her torso, to her thigh, where she snuck a finger beneath her beltline and felt a bruise warm the surface. She must've landed on something, the ignition key, she realized. She'd be all right but lay until a moon rolled halfway up the night, shown bright as bone, and only then did she gain her feet, brush away the sand and climb to where the outpost should've been but said when she got there was bald-faced, glassy-eyed rock. A nothing scab of stone.

So it's no wonder a big sound delivered across the sky, even with me explaining thunderclap, finds her curled at the end of the bed. She must've figured, even then, that storms would never be the same, the thrill of seeing the sky on fire. That on the Fourth of July, before fireworks begin, she'd draw a bath, submerge her ears and listen for whatever knocked around the porcelain, and know beating beneath it all is a human sound, an enigmatic sound, like humping down a mountainside moonlit. A sound, if you believe it, that's a better than celebration. ~

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