The coyote frowned, the tension draining from her as a blanket settled over her unsettled mind. Turned, abashed, back toward camp. “No. Maybe. I don’t know.”
The hand of God had loosened its grip around her mind and here she was, back at camp, back by the barrel cactus and saguaro, back beyond the trees, where ferns fingered the air and fronds like hands reached out to touch them.
It did not last.
-The camp grew quiet once more. Sara handed her bookmark back and she fingered it, book forgotten. She felt the letters etched into the thin brass, felt the words there, proven now to be incorrect, felt the shapes telling lies against her skin. She felt the weight of that hand, at once comforting and threatening, settle once more against her brain-stem, compressing, caressing, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing…
+The camp grew quiet once more. Sara handed her bookmark back and she fingered it, book forgotten. She felt the letters etched into the thin brass, felt the words there, proven now to be incorrect, felt the shapes telling lies against her pads. She felt the weight of that hand, at once comforting and threatening, settle once more against her brain-stem, compressing, caressing, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing…
The quiet grew thick. The air grew heavy. The light failed.
And one by one, they went to bed. The physicist. The linguist. The archaeologist. The botanist.
One by one they retreated to their tents and their own personal narratives diverged once more. Perhaps they slept, perhaps not. Perhaps they dreamed.