Written June 15, 2020

Nothing and everything changed there, where the wind lamented in whispering melodies isolated and harmonizing in the canyon’s jagged corridors. The desert was expansive—pockmarked here and there by dusty shrubs resembling stationary tumbleweeds.

There was a tree on the edge of the canyon. Its bare branches were stiff and brittle, the thin bark slowly being sloughed away into the rapids below by the stinging wind. Spindly roots gripped weakly at the sand, which slid between or off of them, leaving them chafed and unnourished. The tree was the only one of its kind, lonely and looming, but pathetically so, as if it would rather be small and inconspicuous like its shrubby counterparts.

In the distance, emerging from the wavering horizon line, a small figure dragged itself across the sand. Its progression was so slow that at times it seemed like an indiscernible dark patch keeping pace with the shifting dunes. Occasionally it disappeared altogether.

By the time it reached the edge of the canyon, settling near the tree, night had fallen. The moon was mocking and cold in the night sky, and it revealed with its harsh light the gaunt shell of a man.

At an earlier time he would have been called Edward Kenyon. The head archeologist of an excavation gone awry. None of that mattered now. Nothing mattered when the awing power of the sun touched one’s skin until they were forced to surrender, unable to cry lacking bodily fluids, unable to laugh lacking the strength in their lungs to inhale one more ounce of parched air. There was no humanity here. Everything was brought to its knees, and then further down until they were diminished to dust without the brainpower to know or care.

This is what Edward Kenyon found in the desert. This, and blood diamonds. There was no way that he could have known. They had been artfully buried on the site and most certainly were not meant to be found. But they were, and one boy, a soft-faced twenty-year-old fancying himself a refined version of Indiana Jones, emerged from the ancient cavern wielding the velvet sack over his head. 

There must have been more than one hundred of them there, like little fallen stars. The boy let them spill out of the bag in a mesmerizing waterfall of abstract shapes onto a table as the entire team gathered around to catch a glimpse. Sparkling pinpoints created by the sun glinted off of the gems into each person’s eyes.

The oldest man in the team was shaking his head and mumbling to himself. Kenyon asked the woman next to him what he was saying. “Something about the Central African Republic. He says the diamonds came from there. They were probably trafficked.”

The boy, not one to miss a word, pricked up his ears and allowed his face to be consumed by a guileful grin. “Trafficked or not, I see a bright future ahead. Filled with mimosas and fine wines. I say we consider this our most successful find and be on our way.”

The woman frowned. “We can’t take these. Dangerous people will be looking for them. We should put them back where they were. Where they belong.”

“They belong at the bottom of a river, but they’re not there, are they?” The boy retorted, rolling a diamond between his thumb and forefinger and lifting it into the sunlight to contemplate it. 

Before the woman was able to make her inevitable fiery jab, Kenyon, with his smooth voice made for solving problems, told them both to quiet down. He resolved that the best thing to do was to leave them there, on the table, readily available for their transporters to pick them up without fuss.

How he wished that was what came to fruition. The memory of what occurred that evening had evaporated with Kenyon’s sweat long ago. Now, lying face upward beneath the scrawny branches of a tree in Mauritania of Saharan Africa, all Edward Kenyon could muster was a vague recollection of gunshots, the boy falling facedown in the sand with a dark liquid seeping out of his temple, and fires resembling those in paintings of hell all around him. He had somehow been spared from the tumult only to be thrown roughly off a moving vehicle in the middle of the desert without food, water, or dignity.

Stars, Kenyon thought. I remember little fallen stars.

Unlike those many billions before him who have died and were stuck in that special stage between life and afterlife, Kenyon did not see his existence flash before his eyes. Instead he saw his death. He realized that a future does exist when death is considered. Not a future filled with prosperity and animation, but one that was like the negative side of a number line, one that worked backwards and went back so far it eventually went forward again. 

Kenyon saw himself slowly sinking into the sand, the tiny granules sifting into his orifices and mummifying him like the ancient people he wanted to study, to discover and decode. He saw the seasons come and go, which in the desert simply means a slight change in tone of the sun’s rays and a fluctuating temperature. He saw the tree’s roots creek their way to his body, seeking what little moisture was left in him. He saw the particles that used to be his skin and his organs and his hair gradually becoming part of the desert, just as everything in the desert became the desert. And he realized that this was enlightenment.

He smiled his dehydrated smile that was not dehydrated of human soul, and he enjoyed the purity of the night sky, the vast sprawl of the Milky Way.

It was then that the tree began to speak to him. At first it produced a dull murmur, like the ambient noise in a restaurant. Then it settled into a soothing timbre, and Kenyon could hear what it was saying.

“Thoughts spilling from gentle tundras to cool water. Water, like the stars. Unattainable. Perhaps dead already and dangling their light like false faces. Cool water. Martyr. Martyr am I, who believes in water and stars. Stars. Light. Bright…” 

The tree’s voice trailed off, and Kenyon, who had been gradually settling into a strange kind of sleep, abruptly regained consciousness. “Tree, my friend, why did you stop?”

“I did not know you were listening,” the tree said. “Not many listen to the poetry of a desert plant.”

“Poetry. Yes. You are magnificent, you know. Absolutely.”

“Absolutely,” the tree repeated, perhaps enjoying the lilt of the word. “Thank you. But—if I may ask—to whom am I addressing my thanks?”

“Edward Kenyon. And you, tree. What is your name?”

“I have no name. No one has named me. Not many living beings pass through here,” the tree replied with a touch of sadness. It paused briefly before continuing. “Why don’t you name me?”

Kenyon closed his eyes and smiled. “Am I worthy?”

“There is no one else who can.”

Kenyon’s smile receded like a wave of an ocean he had not seen in a very long time. “The desert is the only one who can name her children.”

If a tree could nod solemnly in agreement, Kenyon reasoned that this one would have. The tree and the man listened to the music of the desert.

“Mr. Edward Kenyon, everyone in the desert waits for something. What do you wait for?” asked the tree.

Kenyon pondered this deeply before finding an answer. He fished it out of the depths of his soul. “A star.”

“Then we wait for the same thing.”

“There should not be so many names for salvation,” Kenyon said with conviction.

“As you said so wisely, Edward Kenyon, the desert decides this.”

“The desert decides everything,” said Kenyon, because he knew this was what the tree was thinking. They were one now, he and the tree, because they were in the same place, yes, but even if they were not in the same place they would be one. They were waiting for the same thing. 

“I feel it coming, friend,” said the tree.

Kenyon could feel it coming as well. There was no denying that it was close. 

“Shadows. There are no shadows in the desert, though the desert is a shadow. Death is swathed in scarlet hues, ghastly purples, ghostly blues. Whether one counts by fours or twos, in the end that one will lose. Perhaps stars splash silver over planet dunes,” the tree hummed its soporific voice. 

“Magnificent. Absolutely,” Kenyon sighed. “A gift to the desert.”

“From the desert. The desert is poetry,” the tree said. “And yet—”

But this sentence could not be finished, for above Kenyon’s sallow face and the tree’s gnarly boughs was a falling star preparing to overtake these lost souls and embrace them into its bright splendor.

Kenyon closed his eyes, his smile reflecting the glaring white light. The tree shuddered its bare branches. They had waited. It had come. A glorious falling star.

Fallen Stars © Safira Schiowitz