She’s forgotten her phone somewhere on the roadside and is bent down in the dust, searching. She’s hot. Her bra itches at her skin, and she’s thinking about the sun beating down on her scalp. She’s actively getting a sunburn, she knows it, and she’s not panicking. Her stomach hurts too, and now she’s thinking about what all those eggs for breakfast are doing in her guts. She stands up and drinks from the water bottle she’s holding. She wonders how long she’d forgotten about it sitting in her hot car, noticing the plastic flavor. She thinks about how she’s pretty far from her car by now.
She looks to the right, at the endless road leading towards her hometown. She could cook eggs on that hot highway. She thinks about her kitchen.
She looks left, at the horizon line between road and sky. But in fact, she notices, there is no line, just heat waves waving. She thinks about how this whole desert used to be an ocean. Strange seaweed must have grown here. That history can be read about in the library of layers of sediment on the mesas. Dinosaurs swam here with micro-organisms once upon a time.
She looks down past her feet, where she stands on the edge of asphalt. This road is made out of oil, fossil fuels, she remembers. And down, down, under more, more invisible layers of sediment, heated by the core of the earth, are the bubble-oceans of crude oil. Mined by the pumps that scatter this desert. She feels the immense pressure of heat and rock from all sides crushing, crushing those remains of ancient life into hot, black, tar.
She looks up, and sees one single small ovular cloud. No. Something moving away from her, up, up. Now gone. Her mind has still not quite left the core of the earth, and she feels the discomfort of stretching into the opposite blackness of space. She follows the moving object past gravity. She matter-of-factly knows that it’s alien, and must accept this, just as she accepts the infinite heat of the earth’s core and the life of a dinosaur from the beginning of time.
She feels herself being stabbed by the lines representing the x and y axis of the world. A dreadful infinity stretches everywhere, the expansion of everything. The big bang. She remembers how, long ago, she had asked her physics teacher to explain to her that if the universe is expanding from a singular point, where is that point? She was small and confused, so angry at everything, and had been so disregarded. She notices, now, the lack of a z axis in her mind, and floats upward above the graph. Then her mind reaches the very end of its human limit, and falls off into stillness.
She floats in a different kind of blackness, a friendly forever. What was she just thinking about? She feels the cool ocean on her crust and raging fire in her core. Her guts no longer scream, because she is her guts, more than she ever was her head. She hears wind rushing around the canyons like the current waves. On the back of her eyelids there is gasoline that shimmers like prehistoric or alien organisms under water. She’s forgotten that her eyes have been closed. She opens them.
She looks up at the blue, cloudless sky. And the sun. She squints, not yet adjusted, and she enjoys the view.
She looks down at her feet, standing on the highway and the red dust. She follows a little cricket resting on some grass, as it suddenly flies and lands close-by. Oh, there’s her phone. She sighs with relief and feels her breath in her stomach. She’s hungry.
She looks left at whatever’s down the highway, past the curve of the earth out there. She forgets the name of the next town over. Surrounding the road are the grand, red, mesas, with their layers and layers of shades of red and brown.
She looks right, towards home. She walks the short couple of paces and grabs her phone from where she’d left it yesterday. She’d been here with her daughter to admire this view at sunset. She unlocks it and takes a photo of this lunchtime lighting, where the shadows cut the rock to make another opaque layer. She opens photos, selects the picture, and sends it to her daughter. “Look!” The message is green and the loading bar is stuck at the end. She pockets her phone and looks around at this space again as her mind drifts to the egg sandwich that she’s been dreaming about lately.