SHE IS LYING ON her side in the dust; she is sighting along the curve of the desert floor. She is looking out underneath the round polished belly of an ant; the sun is pinging in the creases of his body as though he were made in sections of brown opaque glass. He is rolling a grain of white granite.
The granite cinder is half the size of the ant; it hangs at the lip of a crack. The ant pushes the boulder over the lip; she waits. She lays her ear tighter to the earth. She hears the boulder crashing to the bottom of the crack. She sees the ant slip into the crevice and disappear. She listens. She cannot hear him. She cannot hear him working his way down between the walls of the chasm. He is too careful.
She rolls over on her back. She closes her eyes and puts her hands out flat on her belly and pulls the warm dry air in through her nose and lets it puff out the sacks of her lungs until they are stiff against the inside of her ribs and there is a tingling across the top of her thighs. She imagines her hair slipping into the cracks beneath her, the long shiny black hair rolling like quicksilver off itself and over the alkaline dust and cascading down into the cracks, winding under the earth until her head is bound there like a rock pinned beneath a spider web. She feels a single drop of water bead on her forehead. It rolls over the bridge of her nose and across her cheek and evaporates.
She can feel the air bending like water around the soles of her feet and can feel it wash up her legs and pool in her belly, running back down through the dark hair and piling between her thighs; feel it moving in twirls up over her ribs, rushing up across her breasts, lying in the pocket of her throat, flowing up over her ears like hands burying in her hair; coming up the side of her leg, around below her hip under her back where there is space between her and the earth, back across her chest and gone, over her arm, tingle, finger, stretch, gone. Tongues of air roping like coils, water brushing dry leaving all the pores of her flesh puckered. With her head to one side she can see it touch out on the desert floor, gone.
She closes her eyes and lays her hands back on her belly.
The ant emerges from the crevice, his antenna filtering the air. He turns around and pulls a sage twig out of the crack. He sets off backwards and the spurs of the twig scratch the dust as he tugs. The noise alerts her; she turns to watch. The ant pulls the sage twig in jerks, levering against a boulder, twisting, until he has the twig at the edge of another crack. She rolls over on her side to place her ear tight against the white earth. He gives the twig a push and she hears it crash like a log batoning down the walls of a shale canyon tearing the earth loose. The ant slips into the crevice and she listens. She cannot hear him.
She rolls over on her stomach and lays her hands flat against the earth and shuts her eyes. She feels the prickling at the bottom of her spine as the moisture evaporates. The light covers her and she can feel its weight against the back of her legs; she can feel the thin blonde hairs on her arms absorbing it. A pressure against her ribs. Up over her back and the tiny hairs fold under the coming weight like rolling wheat sheening the light. It pools in the dimples of her flesh and washes out over her legs to her ankles and splashes over her heels and down over the soles of her feet and pushes against her toes. It moves through her hair pulling it up from her back and washing it over her shoulders, fluffing it flashing in the white light. It curves around to her face and she can feel it curve in the corner of her eye and run out over her nose vibrating the hairs on her cheeks. It tunnels up between her breasts and is gone.
She opens her eyes. She can feel the corner of her mouth wet against the earth. She folds her arms across her back and pushes her body against the weight. She rolls on her side and pulls her knees up. The sun blinks in the fold of her belly. The brown nipple of her white breast rests against a crack in the earth.
The ant is wrestling the husk of a seed. She watches him. He pulls the seed into the shade of a grey stone and leans against it. She can see the swirl of dust snaking over the desert floor toward them. It takes a long time, stopping and disappearing, then starting again, puffing the dust with sighs; the sun begins to fall before the swirl arrives. It comes suddenly over the grey stone like a wave breaking, bowls the seed from the ant’s grasp into a foreign crevice and tumbles the ant away. Then it flattens out. It evaporates. It brushes her hips.
The girl rises to her knees and watches the sun balance on the serrated ridge of the mountains. She puts on her clothes.
The ant emerges slowly from a cul-de-sac of dust. He walks across the desert. He disappears into the crevice after the seed.
The girl runs her fingers through her hair like combs and swings it free from her back. She puts on a jacket and twines her arms across her chest and feels the tingle on her thighs where the sun has lain. She fans her hands to a fire of small twigs. Her breath fogs. The puff of hair between her legs is kinked with warmth.
She is asleep. The ant emerges from the crack in the floor of the desert. He has the seed. The yellow light of the full moon glints on his round smooth belly.