I submitted my first piece of fiction for publication! Here’s hoping for an acceptance letter. Here is a brief excerpt.

The blanched waste below stretched out in every direction, a lifeless maw threatening to consume lands beyond. Dusty, beige hills gave way to dead lakes and defiant mesas reached into the colorless sky. It was home.

But when she looked down –her vision unusually sharp in these moments– she saw the desert wasn’t the lifeless expanse it had presented itself as before. A thick stubble of banana yucca shrubs adorned the undulating hills, their stiff, dark-green stocks stabbing the air. Desert clickers perched on creosote branches thrummed thick hind legs against their abdomens, the clicks and chatters building into a crescendo congruous with day’s heat. Even along the washes and salt flats, a rattlesnake zagged between the alkali siphoning allscale bushes. The desert teemed with life. She could see it, smell it in the pockets of warming air that lifted her further away from the ground.

Below, in the distance, a long cloud of dust chased a shadow of unnatural angles. She recognized the animals pulling at the dark shape, but the box sliding along the ground felt familiar only at the edges of her mind, like a dream washed away in the light of consciousness. With subtle changes in the angles of her body, she dove down and closer, then up again catching another lift of warm air, then down again as if riding the waves of an invisible ocean.