Prompt: “The Burden of Memory”
What compels impulsive behavior? – he was afraid to ask. As the desert landscape crunched under his Nissan wheels, he felt exposed, naked as a man with apple breath on the eighth day of creation, naked under a vast and uncompromising sky. Around him: brown land with thorny cacti and thirsty plants. His own demeanor: a porcupine with a hungry soul, ravenous and ready to pounce on life.
Jacob lived among the Tucson mountains with suaro companions and no wife. Why did he do it? His breath skipped and bumped like the car on the dirt road. He was escaping himself in his beat-up sedan.
As Tucson receded further away, the lonely forms and shapes of dry rocks that emerged from all directions struck him with an odd eeriness of being alive. He felt like he was in Salvador Dali painting faced with the structures of his unconscious. There they were: childhood failures, repressed sexuality manifesting shamlessly on the phalic-shaped rocks and ugly landscapes.
The shapes, indeed, seemed to expose to all desert life why he had committed the crime.
