Desert

A lonely little store and gas pump stand is the only beacon of life in a deserted dessert of sand and tumbleweed. A woman sits out front on a metal folding lawn chair with plastic woven slats that leave red lines in her skin. The slats are disintegrating because of the sun and the shreds that stick up scratch the woman’s legs, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Her face is blank of any expression, either restful or with so few interactions with other people she has forgotten what it means to show expression. Her eyes are pallid and gray, as if they too are bleached from the sun. The woman has owned the store for most of her life, taking it over at a young age from her grandfather who had passed away long ago from lung cancer, which was no surprise after sixty years of smoking. The woman thought she had learned her lesson from his death, but ten years later she too picked up smoking and now sat outside in the sun, skin wrinkled and dark, smoking one cigarette after another. The only event that marked that passing of time was when one cigarette burned down to the stub and she threw it in the bucket that sat next to the chair and lit another one.
Once in a while a truck would roll by. Sometimes they stopped for gas, or a pack of cigarettes, or a bottle of water and a bag of chips. There was no other gas station for many miles around, so she got the unlucky drivers who rolled in on the last drop of gas, desperate from the heat, and grateful for another face that wasn’t made of sand. The cars and trucks that pulled in were always covered in dust, and the faces were covered in dust, and the children’s hands were covered in dust because they had been stuck out of the windows grabbing at the air and the blowing sand and occasionally a piece of tumbleweed that had blown up from under the tires.
The woman was pleasant to the people that stopped, but never said more than she needed to. She wasn’t looking for conversation, she was happier to exchange money and see people off. She was more at ease watching the backs of the cars or trucks drive away than the fronts of cars or trucks pulling in. But she always had a vague smile ready for her customers because she felt that they expected that after so many miles of seeing no one. She, too, was covered in dust from sitting outside and catching the sand and dirt and pieces of tumbleweed that blew by in the constant light wind. Sometimes the wind grew harsher and the sand bit her cheeks so her cheeks were always red both from the biting sand and the constant sun. Her teeth were browned from smoking and her hands and arms were wrinkled from the glare and deeply tanned. But her legs were pasty white underneath the jeans that she wore everyday. They hadn’t seen the sun in many years; they only felt the heat coming through. Her boots were dusty, and the hat that she wore sometimes was dusty, and her store windows were dusty, and the interior of her store had gradually collected dust as well so everything that was bought had a fine layer of sand on it that the customer would brush off. If the customer had found the layer of sand in a store in the city, they surely would have left and gone somewhere else for fresher goods. But here, after so many miles of nothing, no one seemed to notice because their eyes were covered in sand as well. Most people that drove through this way, except for the truck drivers, weren’t prepared for such a long stretch of nothing. They never brought enough food or water and were never prepared mentally to deal with endless sand dunes dotted by tumbleweed. They always walked into the store with a glazed look on their faces, with the feeling that they had been away from society for a very long time, even if it had only been a few hours. They almost forgot how to speak, or how to interact with other people. Conversations in the cars, if there were multiple people, had long since ceased because the endless landscape led to endless nothingness in their minds, even their brains were covered in dust.
The woman was used to this. She treated everyone with care because the customers were always a bit shocked and confused to be out of the sun’s glare and to see something with more color than sand. Once in a while, when there hadn’t been a customer for several hours, the woman pulled out her broom from the closet and swept the floor. When the sun wasn’t too bright, she even swept the stoop outside of the store; and on a rare cloudy day she would sweep around the gas pumps and polish the glass. Sometimes she even hosed down the sign.
The woman never waited for anyone to come, she didn’t sit on her plastic chair looking down the stretch of highway that ran to the right and the left. She just sat on her chair, smoking. Sometimes she did a crossword puzzle from a book she had found under her grandfather’s bed after he died. He had completed the first few in pencil, but the marks had mostly faded and nearly disappeared. But the rest of the book was blank and she worked through each one with pen because she didn’t want her marks to disappear, she wanted her letters to last and last. She wondered who would find the crossword puzzle book under her bed.