If anything happened at all I guess it happened when I lived in that little wooden house in the middle of an Oklahoma desert. The house was barely a shack and sat at the bottom of a sand dune around five metres high. Sometimes, when the wind blew hard, you could hear the sand hitting the house like little angry bullets. I remember how they seemed to scream as they flew around.

At the start, the noise was so bad I couldn’t sleep. I just lay awake listening to it. I’d solve the tiredness in the morning when the wind stopped blowing so hard by shutting the curtains on the sun and sleeping until whenever I woke up.

I bought the house from a farmer who’s planting land had finally been buried by the frequent dust storms. The farmer gave me the keys to the house bitterly, almost crying. I’d paid more than what he was asking for the little house, though it was basically just a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom. He left me a bed frame and mattress in the corner of the living room and a little square television set that only picked up the news channel and a kid’s cartoon one.

The land that came with the house surrounded it in a wide circle. The house stood in the middle. There were some tiny tufts of grass poking up through the dust every few yards, but it was brown and dead. The land covered about one hundred acres and was surrounded on four sides by three farms and a highway. I’d bought the house because my father had died and left me a chunk of money I didn’t want.

I felt uncomfortable having it. I guess back then money bothered me. I was filled with the ideas of the writers I used to love. The ones who wrote honestly and with passion didn’t have money when they started. They had nothing except what they earned. All the time the money was in my bank account I could feel it mocking me. I had nightmares about the bills floating out of the bank and laughing at the words I’d written, and after a while, it started to make me hate what I wrote. And as soon as you don’t like the writing, you’re finished. The words start to mean nothing. They just exist on the paper. So, I spent every penny on a dead farm and that wooden house.

It worked at first. I started remembering the things I had always wanted to write about but put off until I was ready. The things I was scared I would mess up if I wrote about them at the time. I wrote about being by the mountains surrounding Ronda in Spain when I was young and full of wine. How I stood there watching them and the whole world seemed to be lined up for me. A perfect straight line that led to the end of my life and stretched back before I was born. How I wanted to trap that feeling and keep it inside forever. To let it live like a fire in my belly until it burned me all up. The world seemed beautiful.

I wrote how I stopped on the old bridge that ran through the centre of the city, separating the old buildings from the new. How I listened to a busker playing a guitar with his back to the audience. He stood with the railing of the bridge in front of him so no one could make their way around his body. He was facing the old buildings with the mountain range in the distance peeking over the top of them. He seemed to be searching for something as he stared at them. He turned his head every few seconds without seeming to pay any attention to his guitar. The music flowed from it like a radio, perfect and lifeless. I wrote about walking to the man’s side and seeing that his eyes were cloudy and dull. Tears dripped from his milky eyes and fell into the sand on the pavement and the music spilt from the guitar. I couldn’t tell if he was crying because of what he couldn’t see or something else that I would never know about.

I remembered these things and wrote them down slowly each night. Typing one word every few seconds because writing them was like being back there and feeling young and drunk, and when I would finish each poem the words leapt from the page and laughed in my face as they breathed into life. But I would sigh when I got them out of me. Like a woman after giving birth. Because they’d been weighing me down for such a long time.

For about a month I was happy. I wrote and wrote until what I wrote stopped being good. I guess I ran out of stuff. I don’t know. It just stopped working. I drove or walked to the town at night instead and drank in the only bar. A small one decorated like an old western saloon. I met Sally there. A small dark-skinned girl with long eyelashes. She liked to drink. Usually alone. I saw her there a few times before I asked if I could get her a drink.

“Sure. Here or at yours,” she smiled at me. We drank in the bar, beer and gin. We stayed there until it closed that first night. She came back to the house the next night.

We stayed in bed for a week. I didn’t know what she did or how she could stay there that long. We spent the week holding each other and not really talking. Sweating onto each other until we jumped into the shower one after the other. I slept well with her there.

But she left after the week. She did that. Every few weeks she’d come and go. Staying for a while before vanishing. It was nice. I liked her. She spoke to me nicely and told me about her life when she was young. I didn’t know if any of it was true and I didn’t care. She read the writing I’d done that first month. She never told me what she thought. She’d either smile when she finished a piece or shake her head and reach for another one. I’d fly to my desk whenever I was alone for a while after I met her. Hoping I could write something that would make her smile. But I’d beat my head for a while instead because the words didn’t want to come. They’d float just outside of my reach, laughing as I tried to grab them.

Sometimes when she turned up she wouldn’t let me touch her until I’d spent a whole day cleaning the house. And it was always dirty when she wasn’t there. Wherever I live it’s dirty unless someone tells me to clean. I handwrite things and toss the paper around and I’ve never understood the point of washing up or making the bed. She’d stand half-dressed and watch me until the living room sparkled and I was too sweaty and hot to do anything about it. Sometimes she’d bring things over. Curtains or blankets and lay them around so the room looked nice. But she always took them with her when she left. The shack became unrecognizable when she was there. There was a small red carpet covered in small elephants that she brought one time that I wanted to keep. But she never brought it back. The only thing that remained the same when she came around was the sound of the sand striking the house.

Sleep was the one thing I could do well with her there. It was an escape that I liked. It didn’t stop me thinking about not being able to write though. In my dreams, I was writing. And the words were beautiful. I could pretend I was a great writer in them. It was only when I woke up that I remembered I didn’t know what I was doing. I started spending my days walking around the buried farmland wondering what my life was. If it was anything.

My life seemed outside my grasp. I’d try and remember things as I walked around the farmland. Memories that seemed to take up half my head and none seeming to belong to me.

“Are you a great writer, Will?” I said out loud to the sand sometimes when it stung my face. It didn’t answer. It seemed to know more than me anyway.

 

‘Ask the sand. Ask the sky.

Ask the cold wind that strikes you like a lover 

And leaves you tingling.

Ask the wife who once had something to say.

Ask the man you used to be and ask the man who you will become.

But don’t ask the man you are and don’t ask the woman your wife is now and don’t ask the void that falls into your heart like an old friend.

Because none of them knows a damn thing.

Ask the sand,

Because it must know.

It must know what you don’t.’

I wrote this lying curled up by the edge of the house after a walk. I etched it into the sand and watched the words being swept away by the wind. I remembered the words after and rewrote it on two scraps of paper.

Terrible words. But it was all I had managed to do since before I met Sally. It was good enough for me. It made me feel better about myself for a while.

The poem was beautiful and genius to Sally and she smiled and danced with me around the room when she read it. Suddenly I saw that it was beautiful, and I must be a genius. I must be. And I picked her up and swept her to the bed. And she didn’t even mind I hadn’t tidied.

The next time I went for a walk I shouted at the wind as it hit me. “Ahh Will. There you are. A new man has come, and he is so much better than you. He will write those words that flew outside your grasp. Perhaps he is a genius. Maybe he’s a fool, but goodbye Will. The man who doesn’t know a thing. I can’t say I will miss you. Adios amigo.” And I saw that pale little man who couldn’t write a thing vanish into the distance.

I drank whiskey and ate cookies and looked out the window at the sun and the thick sand that blew, and I breathed in and out. Every day was the same and it felt good. Sally liked the new Will. She said she’d started to love this Will. That Will touched her face when she said it, though he couldn’t say it back.

I didn’t know why I couldn’t.

The poem was published in a magazine and I got a big cheque. Then it got reprinted by another magazine and another came. I looked at the money in my account and I laughed. It was my money. Not his. Not my father’s. And that felt good.

I thought I would leave when I got something published. But I stayed without even thinking about it. The scenery was changing. It was coming up to winter and the frozen sand that blew against the house started getting noisier. I carried on writing. I wrote and wrote, and it came easy like breathing.

Sometimes I’d eat with Sally at night. She started coming round more after the poem was published. We ate at a stained wooden table Sally had dragged to the house one day. It was the only thing she left whenever she vanished. I liked the dinners. She’d look at me and I’d look at my plate. I never knew what to say. Sometimes she would just talk and tell me about her day or find a funny story from her past that I hadn’t heard before. She was always drunk on wine at dinner and it made her laugh. Which made me laugh. Sometimes she would ask me to tell her about the things I wanted to write about now.

I remember telling her about a dream I’d been having. Something I wanted to write about but couldn’t until I’d seen it.

“I hope there is a big sandstorm soon. A really big one. Big enough that we can’t see. I think just seeing that would really be something. Imagine writing about that,” I said to her, “really something…”

When I slept I dreamt about that big sandstorm. It started just after the poem was published. It was huge in the dream. The whole house rocking under the force of it all. Rocking until it was all swept away and lost. Then I would wake up.

I hoped it would come but nothing changed for a while. Sometimes I woke up sweating, scared I was missing the storm. I’d run to the window and sigh in relief when I heard the familiar noise of sand on the walls. When Sally was there I’d wake to see her lying on her side and staring at me. The way she looked at me. It scared me after a while. She never spoke. She’d just touch my arm. When someone doesn’t speak in that kind of darkness it feels like they aren’t really there. Her presence or soul, if that’s a thing, wasn’t there. It was like lying next to a corpse.

In the days that she stayed with me she started to paint. She painted by the big window that showed a lot of the land. Colourful pictures of the skyline and beaches and sometimes portraits of me and her. There was one she painted of me that I asked her to give me. It was of me lying in the sand outside. I was curled up into a ball and one finger was dipped into the sand. It was the exact scene of when I’d written the poem. I never found out how she’d seen me. The window she sat at didn’t face the back of the house where it’d happened but there it was. I asked her for months after she painted it, but she’d just kiss my brow and say nothing.

The writing settled into a peaceful thing. I did some in the morning and some at night and in the day I’d walk around. I climbed over the fences and walked on the lands of some of the other farms. One had a creek running on one side. Water that flowed from somewhere I didn’t know. I always meant to follow it. The water was clear and any sand that blew into it settled on the bottom or got swept away. I stuck my foot in it sometimes. It was cold and painful and little fish would investigate my foot. Hitting the skin with their fins and toothless mouths. I had to keep my feet still otherwise the fish would dart away, and the sand would rise and muddy the water until it settled back down.

The guy who owned the farm and creek fished in there sometimes and I would see him sitting shoeless on the bank with a wooden rod in his hands. His farm was covered in sand as well, but I’d seen some animals wandering around. He waved to me whenever he saw me in the creek, and I’d wave back and think about writing it all down when I got back to the house. But I never did. I couldn’t write about him then.

We spoke sometimes. About nothing things. It felt nice. He had kind eyes and they seemed to understand something that I didn’t. Before it all happened and I had to leave the house, the best part of my day started to be walking down to that creek and seeing him.

That’s how it’s always been with me. When the writing is going good I barely think about it. More often than not the farmer was there. But it felt like I had it all to myself. Sitting with him was like sitting with my shadow. I used to fish when I was young with my father on the canals back in England, but I never liked it really and he’d always have to drag me out of the house. I used to think about getting a rod and sitting by that creek. Not to keep the fish but just to do it.

I bought a rod the day that it happened. A small wooden one, like the farmer’s. I was about to go to the creek when the whole house shook a little. The wind had been blowing hard that day. It was why I’d driven into the town instead of walking. Now I listened to the pellets of sand. I smiled. When the house shook some more and it started blowing harder, I smiled more. I could feel the big sandstorm I’d been thinking about coming. As big as a Woody Guthrie song. I put the rod down. I thought about Sally settling in her house in the town and wished she was here with me. I wanted to see her walking through the sand. I walked over to the big window. I drew the curtain. The view was nothing. You couldn’t see a thing. It was all dust coloured and dark and the little bits of light you could see didn’t light very much at all.

I could see my car which was parked by the side of the house. The paint on the door was being chipped off bit by bit. The red flaking off and joining the sand in the air. I opened the window a little and felt the wind hit my head. The sand stung my skin where it touched, and a roaring noise filled the house. I shut the window. The noise stopped. I opened the window and it started. I shut the window and walked to the kitchen and poured a glass of bourbon. I drank it down straight with no ice and then poured another one.

I carried the glass to the window and looked back out. It was like the end of the world. I thought I saw some of the red chips of car paint in the air sometimes. Winking at me as they flew out of sight. I remember thinking that if I was going to die someday why not make it that day. It felt like that was the day to die if I was ever going to do it. If not, I might as well just live forever.

The phone rang as I stared out. Two rings before it stopped abruptly. I decided not to die that day if someone wanted to speak to me. I heard a cracking noise and walking over to the other window, the one in the bedroom, I saw the telephone pole wire had snapped and was flapping wildly in the wind. I walked over to the phone and picked it up. There was no noise coming from it.

“Hello,” I spoke into the receiver. “Hello.”

I imagined whoever had been on the other line hearing me and asking if I could hear them. I put the receiver back down. It would have been Sally. No one else had the number. Laughing, I drank my drink down. I was drunk. Whiskey always went straight to my head. I walked to the front door and opened it. Straight away sand blew across my body and I could see it creeping on the floor of the house. I wanted to step outside, but I was scared. Just standing in the doorway was too much… good god, it was like having your skin sanded off. I could feel it buffeting me and to this day I haven’t had the feeling that I felt right then. I was scared and drunk and angry and I wanted to fall on the floor.

I imagined Sally coming out of the storm. First as a shadow that moved closer. Edging its way forward against the wind. Then I would see her black hair. Whipping around and covering her face. Her dark skin would be flushed, and bits of sand would be stuck to it where it had broken the skin. Her arm would cover her eyes and the other would hold her jacket tight against her body so it didn’t fly off. Then she disappeared and I thought about the farmer and wondered what he was doing.

Tomorrow the creek would be full of sand and I imagined the fish swimming in its murkiness and wondering what was going on. My feet were cold now with the door open. I wasn’t wearing shoes or socks. The coldness was a bit like the creek’s waters. I shut the door.

The house was full of sand. It covered everything. The whole room had a fine layer of it covering it all over. The windows rattled in their frames as the rest of the sand outside tried to join its friends. It was like being in a bubble. The wind blew outside hard and I could hear it. I could hear it more than anything. But it couldn’t touch me now and I touched the remnants of it. The small grains on the floor. So calm now they’d been separated from the rest. I picked up a handful and let it fall through my fingers and drift back down to the floor.

I went to the kitchen and poured another drink and sat in front of the T.V. There wasn’t much else to do. The weather channel came on saying something about a storm and I laughed. I flicked it to the kid’s cartoon channel and watched the colours fly about.

I didn’t even think about writing. It was all I’d thought about for months. Writing about this big storm. But now it was here I just wanted to sit and do nothing. I had the feeling that something was going to happen. Something was going to happen and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do, and I didn’t want to miss it. I started thinking about all the things I’d probably missed in my life. The chances I’d never took because I was too scared or not paying attention or because I didn’t know they were there. There were too many of them to think about. They crowded my head and danced away from me.

I thought about the farmer and knew that he would know how I felt. He would sit across from me. Where the T.V. was. He’d sit there and tell me about the things he’d missed. He’d pull a cigarette out of a silver case. The silver case I’d seen hanging from his pocket and offer me one and I’d take it even though I’d quit years before.

It would be one of those moments where you needed to smoke if you ever had done. And I’d pass him a dirty bowl from the side to tap his ash in and he would start to tell me about his wife who was dead and his son who was dead and his daughter who lived in England. He’d tell me about the wishes he’d made. Wishing that he hadn’t beat his son when he drank too much and couldn’t control his temper. Wishing his wife had gotten treatment for the cancer that killed her instead of wanting to go peacefully. The cigarettes would burn red against the darkness in the room and I wouldn’t say a word because the things he had missed out on were bigger than me and I was still too young and I didn’t have enough that I had missed to understand fully and I realized that.

The farmer disappeared from the T.V. and I kept watching its soft glow and drinking. I was too drunk now and my vision was swaying from side to side, but I felt so good and strong. I felt like picking up the house and walking with it in my arms into the heart of the storm. Feeling the rushing stings until I got to where it was all quiet and in a circle around me and I could see everything and not feel a thing. I wanted to put the house down there and see the whole world circle like that. I could see the circle from the window then and I fell asleep watching it whip around and around …

When I woke up the next day the storm was gone, and it was early morning. I remember that morning more than any other moment in my life. The sun hadn’t risen yet. You could only see the very top of it. All orange and yellow and bright on the ground and it hurt my eyes no matter where I looked. My head hurt and I stumbled to the kitchen where I poured a drink of water. I drank before spitting it out in the sink. The glass was full of sand and it stuck to the insides of my mouth. I turned on the tap and let it run down the drain. I hurt all over and I felt weak. I opened the front door and stepped outside. The car had sand covering all four wheels and its doors had only pieces of paint still on them.

I went back to the house and picked up the wooden rod I brought the day before. The sun was warm now it had risen and its light didn’t hurt my eyes anymore. I started to make my way towards the creek. The storm had blown away as much sand as it brought on the fields and the thick layer of it lay in a blanket across the land. My feet left footprints in it when I walked and they were the first marks on it.

When I got to the creek I stared in the rushing water. Not a single fish was visible through the thick muck. Not all of the sand had settled on the bottom yet and the water was blurry. The water seemed to carry it along as it flowed. When I took off my shoes and dipped my feet inside I could feel the grains sticking to my skin. The fish had fled somewhere cleaner. I put my shoes back on and carried on walking along the creek. It was around the time of day I usually saw the farmer sitting there and I wanted to speak to him. I walked for about ten minutes before I saw it. I stared at it. Hard and deep for a while. Taking it all in. My heart broke a little with every second and I didn’t know why. The farmer’s rod lay flat on the floor by the creek. The rod was covered in a layer of dust and the wire with the hook on was nowhere to be seen. Behind the rod, I could see his house. The windows had smashed, and part of the roof had caved in. I could see dust and sand covering the whole bottom of the house. It looked like it was being swallowed whole by it. The jacket that the farmer always wore was half-buried in the sand by the front door.

I turned. I walked back to the house and packed up everything I had and drove away. I was crying. I never went back. I found out when I got to the city the next day that Sally had died the same night. Her car had been blown off the road during the storm and smashed into a tree on the road leading to my farm. I still have the land. I never sold it and the tree is still there.

So, I guess that’s what happened. I can’t figure any of it out and even writing this down hasn’t helped. All I know is I sweat whenever there is a storm now. I wake up when I hear the rattling of windows and feel my heart pounding. I listen to that pounding. I listen for a long time. I go the window and open it and feel the wind hit me. I think about it all. I think about them. You might read this and wonder what it all meant. I do too. I guess something happened and we both missed it.