'Nightbirds' -Novel Excerpt

In the car the air was growing warmer from the smoke. I was getting more and more nervous as time was going on, waiting for’m to get out and wanting to get on with it. I started feeling a little dizzy after a while and that made my stomach start going ‘cause I started getting paranoid then thinking about my truck. I’d dumped the gun early on, but I knew the truck would be harder to get rid of. I’d driven seven hours. Never stopped. Crossed two state lines and found a swamp out in the lost, dirt-covered, back roads. A place with no lights, where the whole sky stretched out pure and simple and clear, a never ending stretch of black, black nothing and stars - southern stars like I’d known so well, and like I can’t ever remember seeing since. I stopped and climbed right out into the black of the night and stood looking up towards the sky. I could feel myself swallowed up in the dark. My heart ached and I dropped down against the hood and stood cursing and crying in the weeds and mud. I was wishing I would have gone sooner. Thinking then it wouldn’t have happened. Thinking then he’d still be alive.

The sky in the desert is a funny thing. Big and black and endless with space. Heartbreaking and beautiful. But it’s a strange thing too, the scale of it. Makes it seem closer somehow, but also further away. Kinda distant and alien. We walked from the sweep of parked cars over towards the lights and the music, where huge rigs of metal scaffolding towered above us in the sand. I’d gone my whole life and never seen so many people. A thick mass of’m, hundreds deep, throbbing in time to the beat as it pulsed and boomed into the night, with the darkness settled in from above and the orange gleam of desert rocks rising up in the background. I could feel the vibration of sound slipping beneath my skin. It was music like I hadn’t ever heard before, and it shook through my bones, and throbbed in my ears and sunk down to the deepest part of my brain. Set back into the rocks was a platform with a dj in a white t-shirt who stood waving his hand in the air, getting high off the energy of the crowd. I shook my head trying to take it all in. I was so tired by then I couldn’t really be sure I wasn’t dreaming. The air had gone cold where the desert temperature dropped in the early morning, but all around me the people danced, alive beneath the moonlight. It seemed like they might just go on forever that way, growing old in the desert, careless and discarded by time. I tried to imagine what it would be like the following morning, with the heat settled down heavy and close, and the drugs worn off, the trail of dusty cars and tired faces in the sun. Still, I knew I’d never come to see it that way. By sunrise I would be gone again.

© Tamar Zak-Collins, 2011