CACTUS FLOWERS AND BONE FLUTES
Mercedes M. Yardley
Mercedes Yardley based her story "Cactus Flowers and Bone Flutes" on the San Rafael Swell. This desert area also appears in her novel Pretty Little Dead Girls: A Novel of Murder and Whimsy. "I spent many a night out there, staring into the dark to see what was staring back," says Yardley.
The San Rafael Swell is a desert area covering 2000 miles in Utah. The land has been sculpted by wind and water into sinuous canyons, unearthly rock formations called hoodoos, and massive gorges. The San Rafael Cactus (Pediocactus despainii) is an endangered cactus. It's estimated that there are only 6000 of these cacti on the planet, and they all exist in the Swell and nowhere else. The San Raphael Cactus, also known as Despain's Pincushion Cactus, bears gorgeous yellow or pink flowers, and guards them with small but ferocious white thorns.
People have always passed through the Swell, but no one lives there permanently now. The Fremont, Paiute, and Ute people left pictographs on the stone walls of the canyons. The Old Spanish Trade Route went through the canyon from the mid-1700s to the mid-1800s. Today people use the canyon for cattle grazing, uranium mining, and tourism. Because the terrain looks so alien, Hollywood comes to visit occasionally for filming, and the Mars Desert Research Station is located here. But no one lives permanently in the unearthly, barren, and beautiful realms of the Swell itself.
***
The desert had devoured the parents of Lucas Marsh many moons ago. It hadn’t come as a surprise, not really. It had been stalking them for months, leaving footprints outside the door of their house, pressing its face of sand and grit to their windows.
“You shan’t have us!” his mother had shouted defiantly into the night sky. The universe was stapled with stars, and they gleamed and preened down at her, coating her black hair and the baby she held with the faintest of light. “We will outlast you!”
Baby Lucas cooed and waved tiny starfish hands. The desert laughed. Nobody outlasted it. It was created of dunes and bones and fur. It sharpened its teeth on rocks and scorpion stings.
The father disappeared first. Just a flurry of dunes and then he was gone. No sound. No screams.
“Dust to dust,” the priest later intoned, and Lucas’ mother winced at the choice of words, holding Baby Lucas far too tightly. Lucas squalled. So did the desert. A man is delicious and his skull polishes up nicely in underground caverns. But it still isn’t as satiating when you wanted a man and his toothsome wife.
She survived two more years. Lucas learned to eat and crawl and walk and run. He played deep inside the nest of their home, never in the front yard, and certainly not in the back, where the desert left gifts for them. Slivers of birds. Shiny rocks. Flutes made from the bones of little girls (little girls are often forgotten and lost in the desert). The desert left its most precious possessions. It only wanted to share.
His mother took the last delicate bone flute, and her fingers tightened around it until she heard a sharp crack.
“Stay here, baby,” she whispered to Lucas, and set him up in the womb of his playroom. “Mama will be right back after I discuss something with the universe.”
She kissed him, turned on her heel, and strode out the front door, a shining apocalypse of fury.
Lucas played. He spun around in his playroom and hugged his favorite white tiger and pulled all of the books from the shelf. He looked at pictures of his daddy and rubbed his hungry tummy and eventually flopped over onto his side and fell asleep. He was still sleeping when his neighbor came and picked him up, cuddling the tiny boy to his chest. Tears disappear beautifully into a sleeping child's hair, and when the neighbor sniffled over Lucas's newly dead mother, the boy's hair was like magic, wicking the sorrow up and away.
Two days later a larger, longer bone flute showed up in the backyard. There was something familiar about it, something that would have made Lucas sob even though he wouldn’t have understood why. But Lucas wasn't living there any longer, and didn't see it.
This distressed the desert, who played soft, mournful songs long into the cold nights. A man is lovely. A woman is charming. But a tasty little boy would be absolutely divine.
When Lucas was eighteen, he graduated school and moved back to his old home. College didn't attract him. Pretty girls and boys didn't interest him. He wanted to sleep in his old room, run his hand down the bannister that his parents' fingers had polished with use. He wanted to remember.
He sat on the front porch in his father's old rocker. The sun was going down behind the mountains, and the colors spilled across the sky and red sand like spattered blood.
Crickets. Cicadas. The sounds of lizards skittering across the sand, of coyotes stepping lightly through the sage, the smell of heat and sunbaked rock and eyeless fathers and dead mothers.
The desert prowled up to the front porch, eying Lucas Marsh with interest. Lucas eyed it back.
"I'm not scared of you, you know," he said. His voice was firm and clear and lacked the thick Spanish accent of his mother.
The desert wondered if he'd taste of limestone and tumbleweeds.
Lucas sighed, leaning his head back against the rocking chair, and for a second, the desert almost felt ashamed. This boy was too young to be so weary. He should be fighting and kicking and running across the dunes like a jackrabbit. He should be climbing the mesas and screaming at the sky when he made it to the top. All of the things that boys did, he should be doing. But he was not.
The desert's heart wrenched, briefly. It beat, and inside of that great, big, calcified heart beat the tiny hearts of night animals whose eyes shone in the dark, of unfortunates who were left to die under the bleaching sky, of Mr. and Mrs. Marsh, whose dark eyes alone made them irresistible to the oldest of the elements.
It beat, and then it stopped, and the desert shook its head to clear it. It sniffed at the boy, at this Lucas Marsh, and heard the blood running a bit too slowly through his veins, and smelled his apathy coating the irises of his eyes like desert honey, like nectar in the red cactus flowers, and then the desert smiled and opened its mouth.