From behind the wheel of Paul’s white ‘ GMC pickup, Bella finally hears the giant bell clang. A surge of relief rolls chills down her spine. Sweat pools along the base of her neck, beneath a long braid of silver hair. The heat is unbearable; it’s nearing 105 in the salt flats. Paul, sitting shotgun, shirtless and shoeless in a pair of cutoff shorts, pretends not to hear his daughter’s ringing plea over the engine’s wood-chipper rattle. The edges of his wife’s mossy green eyes, hidden by a pair of dark aviator sunglasses, grow hot with tears as she steers their hunk of vintage metal toward the Black Mountain Range, a towering wall of metamorphic rock that makes her relief sour with an inescapable truth: Star is tough. But, no doubt, Mother Nature is tougher.

This “road” is a forgotten stretch of dirt originally carved into the dried-up remnants of an ancient lake by the mining company who founded Ghost Town in the mid-19th century. It’s barely drivable, bedeviled by deep sand drifts and desiccated mud. Paul’s exposed thigh meat jumps and jiggles as he tries to coax the window down with a busted hand crank. He’s in need of a heavy breeze.

A spiky ball of guilt lodges itself behind Bella’s ribcage, calling up a bloody montage of possibilities informed by the aftermath of her daughter’s forced desert retreats. The third- and second-degree burns. The broken bones. The snake bites, ankle sprains and near-starvation. The post-traumatic stress. A short film plays out on the inner lenses of her aviators; every scene shows Star breaking down, eventually buried by the blowing sand mere steps from home, as she — the mother, the nurse, the shield between her spawn and Paul’s eccentric madness — flees for the funeral of a burnout hippie renegade she hasn’t heard from in half a century.

Overcome by guilt, Bella applies pressure to the brake with her black ostrich-skin boot and locates an ideal spot to whip into a U-turn and jet back to the compound. The gas gauge is broken but the fuel tank is brimming with diesel. If she speeds, maybe she can make it to the water pump in under half an hour; that’s where Star will be headed if she can still walk. Unfortunately, Paul, dead-set on making it to Big Bear Lake before sundown, senses the minor loss in momentum. After 53 years of marriage, he’s grown to know his wife through an insidious sixth sense. He’s become a lumpy panther, lurking in the thicket of wedlock, camouflaged by familiarity, anticipating Bella’s next move.

As she adjusts her grip on the wheel, eyeing a wider stretch of road near a bone-dry gully — perfect for a swift turnaround — Paul grabs his wife’s forearm like a vice. He places his hand perfectly between two thick silver bands, which are adorned with raw turquoise stones — bracelets Bella made herself and has worn everyday for years. Paul’s leathery palm, timeworn with calluses and small scars, sinks into her flesh as if it’s returning home, eager to assert a type of steadfast dominance that can only be cultivated over decades spent side-by-side, day after day after day.

“Lovebug.” Paul says. “Keep driving.”

Bella’s hands are fastened around the steering wheel, her fingers placed along its smooth sloping ridges. She pretends not to hear him. “The bell,” she says, “Didn’t you hear the bell?” She continues to apply pressure to the brake, craning her neck over her left shoulder, ready to turn.

“Keep. Driving.”

Paul had also heard the bell. He felt a similar wave of relief, knowing his only child was still alive. But unlike his wife, he trained himself long ago to trust wholeheartedly in Star’s survival techniques; if his daughter perished, it would be a failure of his own instruction, and that was impossible. Typically, Paul would be glad to welcome Star back to the compound. Reveling in tales from beyond the property. Witnessing first-hand his daughter’s enhanced understanding of how to depend solely on herself and a limited set of tools. But nothing was typical about these past few days. His brother’s death came as a shock. There wasn’t time to wait for Star’s return. If they’re going to make it out of the desert in time for Roddy’s funeral, Paul knows he must keep Bella on track.

Bella slams the brake to the floor. The truck halts and lurches like the mechanical bull in the backroom at Cheeky’s, a long-gone Ghost Town dive. Paul’s head whips back and forth like it did when he was a teenager, riding the bucking beast, destined for the mats.

“Paul. We need to go back,” Bella pleads. She stares into the rearview mirror at the tire-treaded dirt, avoiding the endless road ahead, a desolate view marred by dust and bug guts. Tears stream from the curved edges of her scratched-up shades. She can taste the wet salt in the creases of her mouth. “Star could be in trouble, she could...”

“She’ll be safer alone on the compound than out in the Big World with us,” Paul says, sweat standing still atop his salt-and-pepper stubble. “We left a note for God’s sake!”

Paul lets go of his wife and reaches for the buck knife he keeps stored under the seat. He unlatches it from its leather casing, crosses his legs, and begins using the knife to carefully sharpen the point on an old carpenter’s pencil. Tiny wood shavings painted red and lined with lead spring from the blade. When it’s finally sharp, he’ll use the pencil to mark their path to Big Bear Lake on a regional map folded up on the dashboard, baked in a triangle of blistering sun. Carving down this old pencil instills a feeling of calm in Paul. Though under this superficial facade, deep within his bones, he’s petrified. Based on his calculations, the Big World is slated to collapse any day now; being there when it does would ruin everything he’s built up and worked towards. The bunker, the self-sustaining lifestyle, Star’s survival lessons, the hoarding of supplies, not to mention his own prophecies, preserved in paint across hundreds of canvases hanging on the inner walls of the barn.

Bella leans over the center console and grabs Paul’s earlobe, planting a wet kiss on the edge of his upper lip. When he turns toward her, she slides her tongue into his open mouth and basks in her deluded husband’s dumbfounded expression; she can taste the fear on him. Without speaking, she pulls away, acting as though he dreamt up her unexpected display of affection. Paul pushes in for more, but Bella pivots her boot to the gas and continues to drive.

After a few minutes, she can feel the pressure drop in the cab. Shreds of wood and lead continue to fly off the blade of her husband’s knife, bespeckling his denim lap. He’s immersed in his task.

“My father used to sharpen his pencils with this knife,” Paul says. “I would watch him rock back and forth in the living room at night in that old chair of his. Silent as a musk ox. Sometimes chipping away for so long that all he left was a nub of wood and a pile of shavings at his feet.”

Bella doesn’t respond. She doesn’t give a shit about Old Man Bellamy or his strange nightly rituals, though she is glad to hear her husband drift off into one of his memory trips. It comforts her, even after all these years. Paul’s innate infatuation with the past was something that drew her to him in the early days of their relationship. When they decided to return to Ghost Town after the earthquake, Bella was confronted with Paul’s vivid memory. At night, when the air cooled, the two of them would sprawl out on the purple-stained plateau, where the five-story fire tower now stands, and look down at the demolished town, marked by rows of caved-in homes, razed shops and sidewalks — the quietest disaster, under a sheet of stars. Looking down, with their legs dangling above a forty foot drop, they could see the altar of the church; the steeple had fallen, detached from its perch, and pulverized the conjoining schoolhouse, leaving a gaping hole in its wake. Bella was quiet after the quake; for a long time she couldn’t find the words to describe what it meant to lose everyone she knew. None of it seemed real. So instead of talk, she’d listen to Paul, whose recollections naturally transformed into anecdotes and stories she could live in. The longer he spoke, it was as if she were able to crawl back inside her childhood, surrounded by the people they’d both grown up with, the folks they loved most, and lost.

With Paul entranced, mindlessly flicking his blade against the pencil, Bella realizes that now, if ever, is the best time to act. She gains speed and commits to the U-turn outright, whipping the truck around so the back tires slide across the cracked dirt, spitting up bits of clay and swerving into a deep rut. The front right wheel drops down violently and the cab jolts side to side. Paul’s knife cuts straight down into the pencil, slicing off its crude tip, just barely missing his thigh. Everything on the dash — a bundle of bird’s feathers tied up in an orchid vine; dried rattlesnake skin; the jawbone of a kit fox; a bag of homemade trail-mix; and a folded map — jumps up and slides right, piling against the passenger-side window in a strange witchy heap.

Somehow, despite the chaos, Paul’s doesn’t lose the knife. Without thinking, he drives the blade between his wife’s legs, deep into the seat. When he yanks back on its elk-bone handle, the blade slides easily through the cracked leather, pulling up an explosion of yellow foam. A few chunks cascade down the back of Bella’s cowboy boots. With the pickup now stopped sideways in the road, Paul and Bella are left facing a scorched tundra. Paul looks down at the castrated pencil shaking violently between his thumb and forefinger. His knuckles are taught around the knife. He’s seething. For the first time since they departed, Paul fully directs his gaze at his wife.

She nods to Paul’s bludgeoned utensil. “You’re lucky it was just the tip,” she says, coolly, her chest heaving.

“My only brother is dead. Do you understand that?”

“You hate your brother.”

“That’s irrelevant. He’s the only family I have, and now he’s gone. I need to pay my respects. That’s the way it works.”

“The way it works? The way what works? You think Roddy deserves your respect? What about your daughter?”

“For Christ’s sake, I’m not worried about Star. If anything, I envy her. The wild, the desert; that’s her home. Our home. She’s not the one trekking out into the Big World, a fucking ticking time bomb, full of strangers and unimaginable risks.”

Bella shoots a quick glance down at the slash in her seat. She says nothing. Just straightens out the truck and drives on. With her eyes back on the road, Paul returns to whittling his cherished pencil. Bella knows he never forgave his brother for leaving Ghost Town, and for running away with the rock-and-roll circus. She’s heard the stories, the rantings. Call it empathy, or call it osmosis; either way, Bella now shares a sliver of that same betrayal that slowly eats away at her aging husband’s soul. In fact, she was the last person to see Roddy, as he left the fallout shelter all those years ago. Paul had been snoring in a cot on the other side of the gymnasium when his brother pulled Bella outside to announce his departure; he was headed East, to New York. He had a pile of records stuffed under his arm, car keys dangled from his finger. That was it. He asked Bella to tell Paul he’d see him soon and then he was gone.

“I need you there with me,” Paul mumbles.

“Excuse me?”

“I need you there with me; I can’t face those freaks alone.”

“Star’s in danger and you’re more worried about being judged by a bunch of ancient burnout groupies?”

“Star is fine!”

“How can you say that? The last time she made it back from a Scav she was so dehydrated and feverish she didn’t even recognize us! Her own parents. She thought we were ancient mystics. She thought we were Indians! Dead-set on stealing her organs and sacrificing her to the gods. It took weeks to settle her nervous system, not to mention rid the rot from that bite on her forearm.”

“She fought off a pack of wild coyotes, then cooked the one she slaughtered over a fire she forged from the tinderbox you made her for Christmas. Bell, she survived! It was incredible. And she recovered. To overcome something like that…she’s stronger than she’s ever been.”

“I’m not talking about strength, Paul. I see the way she looks at us now. She’s on edge. Our daughter is skeptical of us. Does that sound right to you? She’s losing trust in us.”

“She’s almost 18 years old, of course she doesn’t trust us. As long as she trusts herself, that’s all that matters. I advise that you find the strength to do the same.”

Bella says nothing. She’s tired of arguing with Paul about their daughter’s wellbeing. He’s delusional and his disdain for the surrounding world has become a thorn in her side. She keeps the truck pointed toward the horizon, bringing the hulking pickup back to speed. She decides to do what she learned to do years ago. Channel this desperate longing for her daughter’s wellbeing into a burning hatred for her unsuspecting keeper: that same daydreaming God-fearing boy who’d rescued her from death. Who persuaded her to return to the ruins of their hometown and build this bizarre, isolated life deep within the desert where no one would ever find them, where they could reminisce and rebuild their old lives, safe from the destructive whims of humankind, the Big World army of rats, destined to eat each other alive. And for a while, she actually believed Paul. She loved him. She trusted his visions. Why not? What else was there for her to do?

But after a lifetime spent fortifying their so-called safe-haven and preparing for the reckoning, Bella, Paul, and their daughter have somehow become the rats, trapped in a cage at the end of the world. At least until now.

Bella rests her head against the door frame and stares into the abyss. Paul blows on the tip of his newly sharpened pencil, brushes off his lap, and snatches the map from the dash. He tries the window crank one more time and the glass pane drops with a thud.

“Onward!” he yells, and buries his face in the scalding breeze.

…TO BE CONTINUED…

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August 8, 1971. Dawn.

The bank teller, a girl just a few years older than Paul, stood at the front desk behind a faded sheet of glass. Her hair was cut like a boy’s. Choppy, above the ears, jet black like the polished beak of a crow. Her head was tilted to the side while her hands moved frantically below the counter. Paul watched as the girl’s thin oatmeal-colored turtleneck took on the same olive shade of her skin then disappeared, revealing a foggy outline of her naked body.

He glanced around the cavernous bank. It was empty, save for him and the teller, whose moans now echoed off the towering sandstone ceilings. They grew louder as he crept closer. Sweat poured from his palms. He had a vice grip on a single paper check, which was now soaked. When he tried to blow it dry, the paper flew from his fingers, drifted across the room, and disappeared from view.

The teller’s left hand rose from below the counter like a deep-sea diver coming up for air. It landed with a thud against the window. Her fingers spread wide and slid against the glass, wiping an arched streak through the haze, exposing her bare chest.

Out of learned decency and the lingering embarrassment of puberty, Paul tried not to look, discreetly tucking his hard-on up into the waist of his jeans. Still, his feet were a runaway train, braking only when his face pressed against the window, his sightline landing just above the pale pink edges of the teller’s nipples. Slightly higher up, another streak appeared in the glass and a pair of mossy green eyes stared back at him. Eyes Paul knew intimately. Eyes he’d become obsessed with in his waking life, ever since the switch flipped on the opposite sex and girls became more than just an inconvenience; when women and their bodies began to overwhelm his daily thoughts, that’s when Paul had first noticed her eyes — two patches of dark dewy grass now beckoning him to remove all barriers. To smash the window. To tear it down. Whatever it took to bring them together. So their limbs could tangle and pull one another to the cool stone floor.

Paul seized the pane of glass with both hands and started to yank, but the weight of the Good Book — the sound of the family Bible booming against the living room floor — ripped him from his dream.

“Let’s go, let’s fucking go!” Roddy, Paul’s younger brother, began screaming at him from down the hall, bursting into the small bedroom. “This shit’s coming down!”

But Paul, in the safety of his quilt, was too wet and too startled to register his brother’s panic. As the room shook, the memory of Bella’s eyes hung heavy in Paul’s mind. He was too distracted by the intensity of his dream to see his boots, the black ones capped with steel, fly across the room like a fired bullet. They clipped him right above the left eyebrow. In a daze, he pressed his finger to his temple, checking for blood. Roddy hurled the rest of his brother’s wardrobe — a sweat-stained Ford tee with a frayed orange collar; thick denim overalls bleached white from shifts at the borax mine; and a sweat-stained trucker cap. The curved brim spun full-speed into the ridge of Paul’s slanted nose.

“Jesus Christ!”

Roddy’s eyes narrowed. His older brother’s motionlessness irked him. It was classic Paul, disassociating at the worst possible time, unwilling to act. Roddy took a breath, and without speaking, he held out his hands, palm-side up, like a scruffy teenaged God. As if to say, Look around, Bud, you’re gonna die.

The bedside lamp crashed against the floor, its lightbulb shattering into a dozen tiny shards. The bookshelf fell face down, spewing books and trinkets across the rug, which their mother had woven when she was still pregnant with Roddy. Paul remembers watching her hands through the slats on his crib as they blended spools of color with two long needles. The memory brought on a surge of calm. Some children see their cribs as prisons and stumble through routine jailbreaks. But Paul stayed put. He liked when the world was small, when he was confined to a four-by-two space guarded by an angel called Mom. Perhaps that was the first major difference between him and Roddy. Prior to his younger brother’s curly blonde mullet, a hatred for school, and an obsession with rock n’ roll — before all that, it was clear that Roddy would never stay put. Paul was powerless to the sinking lure of the past, but Roddy was planning his next move, planning his escape.

A crack began to snake across the bedroom ceiling, dropping little chunks of plaster on Paul and his quilt. The significance of the moment finally hit him.

“Roddy!” Paul yelled, but his brother turned and dashed down the hallway.

Paul ripped off his quilt and jumped from his bed. He slid his overalls on over his soiled underwear and searched for his other boot. It was wedged between his mattress and the wall. He had two identical holes in the heels of his alpaca wool socks. As he pulled at the boot, the floorboards trembled against the skin of his partially exposed feet and sent him somewhere else — propped up on the back of a horse for the very first time. No saddle, no reins. He remembers staring down a newly-formed bald spot at the crown of his father’s misshapen scalp. Wrapping his small hairless arms around the beast’s giant neck. His father loading up his long arm like a shotgun. The old man was seconds away from smacking the horse’s ass as hard as he physically could and Paul knew he’d have no control over the animal once his father made contact. The bucking animal would bolt to the horizon in an all-out sprint. Paul held on as best he could. “Don’t fall,” his father had muttered, winding up.

Haunted by the echo of that first ride, Paul knew this earthquake could become a bronco just as wild. Bucking, unbroken, driven to chaos, capable of anything.

As he stumbled from the bedroom, still trying to latch the left strap of his overalls, the shaking grew more violent. He struggled to stay upright. The single light fixture responsible for illuminating the dark hallway swung on a pendulum. Sparks flickered from inside its pink circular orb and showered Paul, covering the back of his neck like a nest of hungry fire ants. He gripped the walls for balance and screamed out for Roddy but couldn’t hear his own voice over the deafening rumble of nature; it was as if a freight train were barreling straight through their home.

The roof had begun to slide, but Paul didn’t notice until dawn’s orange glow crept through the living room and kitchen, casting long heavenly shadows over a graveyard of the Bellamys’ former life. Paul could see the front door, it was wide open. Beckoning him to follow his brother to safety. He froze. The damage was addicting. His father’s deep-seated rocking chair — where the old man snoozed for a few hours after overnight shifts at the mine — was split in two by a long slab of sandstone that must have dislodged from the top of the chimney and fallen to the earth like a Looney Tunes anvil. His mother’s artwork — paintings housed in frames Dad had fashioned from desert driftwood — lay scattered across the floor. Behind some broken glass, Paul recognized the wide strokes of a yellowish superbloom his mother had sought to capture each autumn, wheeling her easel and brushes out to the desert in a rusted wheelbarrow. The disaster’s forewarning — the family Bible — was there too. It was wide open, spotlit by the rising sun. Despite the quake’s menacing roar, Paul crouched down and picked up the massive book. He was comforted by how the worn leather felt in his hands, unfairly annoyed that it had interrupted his dream. He read aloud what it said at the top of the page. Revelation, Babylon has fallen.

At this point, the roof, which was old and slightly angled, had fully slid from its anchors, crashing into the back bedrooms like an ocean wave made of asphalt. The Bellamy home, or what was left of it, now had the world’s largest skylight. The blinding glow of morning forced Paul to look up and take in the view. The sky had never looked so out of place, so invasive. It was magnificent. The endless tapestry of color, brilliant oranges and yellows. Transfixed by the fiery glow, Paul was stunned by something he could not yet name. He was stuck in a moment that would forever alter his path. A brief period of time that would sink its fangs into the boy and inform every decision he would come to make. Refusing to let go. Until a pair of strong hands seized his shoulders and yanked him backwards, dragging Paul’s useless body through the front door.

Paul was laid out in the dirt yard, rising up on elbows just in time to watch his childhood home collapse into a thick cloud of smoke and dust. The stucco walls caved like a house of cards. At this point, the shaking had stopped. Roddy coughed and spat at the ground. He was bent over his older brother, panting like a rabid dog —“Paul. You’re a fucking liability.”

Paul was in shock. “Dad wasn’t in his chair…”

“He’s probably still at work,” Roddy said, hacking a wad of phlegm into the dirt. A quake strong enough to bring down the house was sure to have done some serious damage at the mines. As the dust settled around them, Roddy tried not to picture the working men being thrown from the steep rock terraces carved into the canyon. Their father was a tough old bastard, and Roddy had inherited his grit, but despite what he may have told them growing up, he wasn’t indestructible. And, to his deepest dismay, neither was Roddy.

Paul was still clenching the Bible in his right hand. His middle finger was wedged inside, marking the page that faced him inside the now non-existent house. With some courage, he would delve into Revelations later — a portion of the Good Book that always frightened him in church as a child. He held the leather-bound book tight to his chest. Aside from the clothes on his back, this was his one remaining possession.

Screams ricocheted through the neighborhood.

About 50 yards to the East, the facade of the Fust’s three story townhouse hit the ground with a soft thud, kicking up a dust cloud that blew through the brothers’ hair and cloaked a small pile of vinyl records in dirt — the only items Roddy had rescued from the house, along with his portable red and gray Phillips turntable.

Together, with their belongings, the boys turned their heads in unison to look back at their next door neighbors’ home. The Fusts were known for throwing Sunday potlucks after church. All that remained was a life size dollhouse, its interior rooms perfectly exposed.

“Happy birthday, brother,” Roddy said, choking on the air. “Hate to say it, but 18 might be a strange one.”

Paul said nothing. He was still scanning the rooms, looking for Bella — the bank teller, Bella Fust — but she, nor her family, was anywhere to be seen. He closed his eyes, lay back in the dirt, and cried.

“Come on,” Roddy said. “Let’s go find Dad.”

…TO BE CONTINUED…

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When the parcel came, Star’s skin was still caked in reddish-brown dust, scathed in sun blisters, her muscles shredded from several days in the wild. The result of one of her parents’ “Scavenger Hunts.” No tent. No tools. No company. Solo missions devised to teach their only daughter about the ones and twos of survival — the only real concept that mattered to the Chasers, engulfing life in Ghost Town like a five-alarm-fire.

Since her 10th birthday, Star has embarked on dozens of Scavenger Hunts, fully naive to the irony baked into the name. The clue-solving games other kids her age enjoy in manicured yards and bustling city blocks were so far off Star’s radar that she accepted her own outings as essential. Bloody, daring jaunts into a world claimed not by humans, but by the animals and insects and plant life that inhabited the land. All of whom were just as hungry and thirsty as the lonesome desert girl as she learned to adapt: Hiding in the shade of sea-chiseled canyons to escape the sun’s devilish glare. Collecting dried sticks and whittling them into spears with kill-sharp ends. Waking at dawn to salvage drinkable water by soaking up fresh dew from nearby rocks and plants, then squeezing the moisture over her cracked, desperate lips.

Star isn’t aware that this Scavenger Hunt will be her last. Though even if she knew this chapter of her life was about to end, it’s doubtful she would have the energy to conceptualize or celebrate. At least not now, teetering on the edge of a blackout.

Returning from the wild always instills the same response in Star; she’s eternally grateful to be alive, yet traumatized by what she’s experienced. A certain sense of celebration exists, folded into her one major accomplishment — making it back home in one piece — but the act of surviving bears a shadow of bewilderment that ends up cloaking everything. At least for as long as the memories reign supreme in her mind: Narrow canyon quicksand. Debilitating dehydration. Heat stroke. Paranoia. Food poisoning. Coyote attacks. Snake bites. Scorpion stings. Flash floods. Starvation. Lightning strikes. And other incidents much more difficult to explain.

By now, Star has experienced a fair share of pain, somehow always clawing her way back from death. For this, her parents are incredibly proud.

Typically, Scavenger Hunts end when Star rings the giant bell at the far western corner of Ghost Town, signaling to her parents that she’s returned home, that she has survived. Usually, the girl is so depleted that she’ll pull the dangling rope, hear the bell clang, and collapse. Later, she’ll wake in her bed, hooked up to an IV, her skin cleansed, her wounds patched, depending on the severity of her injuries. Her parents are always there, leaning over her, welcoming her back to reality. That’s what they call their remote compound, their doomsday bunker, their only child’s post-Odyssey bed-rests: “Reality.”

But Star knows no different. For as long as she can remember, she has considered this — all of it — the norm.

Now, though, as Star rings the giant bell, collapses to the ground and passes out, she wakes in the same spot, gasping for breath, destroyed by the still-burning sun. They didn’t come get her. They didn’t help. The weight of it presses into her weary bones, making it almost impossible to get up and march the remaining half-mile into Ghost Town. Where are they? She’s near-blackout. She has no choice but to follow her woozy sightline, dotted in sunspots, destined for water and shade, driven solely by her most basic instinct.

As Star limps toward town, lifting her legs one at a time, heavy as cement, she doesn’t know she’s being watched.

A falcon carves slow circles in the midday sun, about 100 feet above the lonely desert girl’s mop of tangled hair. The bird keeps tabs on her as she progresses like an injured tortoise down the dusty desert path, leaving behind zigzagging boot tracks in the sand. Star hasn’t clocked the giant bird. She’s delirious, she can barely see past her own toes. When her shin eventually bangs against the sharp edge of the rusted metal water pump she lets out a throaty cry.

The falcon is hungry. It’s difficult for him to see Star for anything but a meal, a pathetic creature on the edge of death. But its claws are occupied. The small leather envelope tied closed with a single white shoelace has been in its grips for miles. The bird knows this girl is the final destination, the purpose of its journey. Despite the girl’s inability to push the pump handle toward the earth, her feet sliding back, her toes digging into the dirt, the falcon — masterfully trained — resists transforming its feathered body into a 200mph projectile dead-set on the fleshy meat of Star’s exposed throat.

Gasping and grunting, Star soldiers on. Her muscles cramp violently. But she’s felt this exact pain before, she knows it intimately. A tainted reminder to tap into a power source she’s spent years cultivating; a supercharged resilience manifested from her time spent in the wild. Forging ahead, alone, just barely slipping past death; this has instilled in Star an undying willingness to live. If her parents can be thanked for anything, it would be for this.

She keeps pumping the handle until she hears a dim splash of water hit the bucket’s wooden base. And soon, the water starts to flow. Star does a slow push-up to her knees, leans her head back and begins drinking directly from the tap. Clear water runs over her face and down her neck, washing away a thick film of dirt and revealing the smooth, freckled skin of a young woman eager to be freed from the wild world she’d been forced to embrace. Under the falcon’s piercing gaze, the girl has transformed, exposing a vitality that almost intimidates the majestic bird.

Fueled by the coolness of the water, how it feels against her wind-burnt skin, Star waits for the bucket to fill, then shakily raises it up above her head, letting a waterfall wash over her scraggly straw-colored hair. It trickles down her chest, with each rivulet, each small stream racing toward her feet, filling her navel, careening around her inner thighs and into the damp pockets behind her rounded knees. A puddle forms in the earth and Star lays back into it, like a salamander cooling off in the desert after an unexpected storm.

Colors burst against Star’s eyelids as she manages to blindly raise her right arm enough to reach back, grasp the sloping handle and pump more water into the ground around her, expanding the puddle into a small pond. The falcon, still circling above, watches in envy, craving both a drink and a bath himself. He’s been waiting long enough to deliver the message. He’s now certain the girl will live. His talons open. The leather parcel drifts slowly downward as the falcon swoops around the nearby barn, setting its sights on Star’s self-made oasis. The parcel falls like a dead leaf on a windless day.

Star’s wits regenerate. Fresh water seeps into her pours. She forces her eyes open and snatches the parcel out of the air, just before it lands in the drenched dirt. Her reaction is animalistic. The falcon, looking on from his perch atop the barn’s weathervane — a circular hazard symbol lathed by Star’s father — is impressed. Now that he’s successfully completed his delivery, he’s ready to indulge. He lifts off, arching his speckled wings like two feathered boomerangs, and touches down on the metal pump, casting a wide shadow over Star’s freshly washed face.

The lonesome desert girl is paralyzed by the sudden presence of the bird and whatever she’s now grasping in her right hand. Is she hallucinating? The falcon’s eyes, perfect black circles ringed with yellow, remain fixed on hers. Its yellow toes are wrapped around the rusty edge of the spigot. The leather parcel burns a hole in Star’s palm, but she still can’t take her eyes off the falcon. It’s razor-sharp beak, its bright-yellow nostrils and long black talons, its elegant, spotted chest. Fear and wonder ricochet against her sternum.

But the falcon has no plan to attack Star. It spreads its tremendous pointed wings, expanding its shadow by at least three feet, and flaps erratically, landing at the edge of the water. Star flinches. Relief washes through her. She even hears herself giggle as the bird dips its beak into the pond and begins to drink. He’s just like me, she thinks, dirty and thirsty and craving.

The bird wades further into the water and shakes playfully, rinsing its feathered body, splashing Star as she tries to protect the thin leather parcel from getting wet.

“Did you bring this to me?” She asks the bird. “Did you come here for me?”

The falcon now ignores Star, continuing to clean itself in the cool water.

It’s time. Star uses her free hand to untie the shoelace and pop open the worn leather envelope. She pulls out a single translucent piece of onion paper. It takes a moment before she can focus her vision on the writing. Directly through the thin sheet of paper, Star sees the falcon, bent over, its beak dipped just below the waterline. She reads the message aloud:

Bird on the horizon, sittin’ on a fence
He’s singin’ his song for me
At his own expense
And I’m just like that bird
Oh, singin’ just for you
I hope that you can hear
Hear me singin’ through these tears

Its thirst quenched, its feathers cleaned, the falcon’s yellow-ringed eyes focus on the girl lying in the shrinking puddle, a piece of onion paper gripped tightly in her left hand. She’s been repeating herself, speaking the same noises over and over in a voice that’s deep and dry. The bird recognizes it, like the low howl of a sand storm riding miles of barren land. Not dissimilar from the voice of his master. Rhythmic. Slow. Calming. Familiar.

A field mouse emerges from a small hole in the corner of the barn door and without thinking, the falcon pushes from the wet dirt into a streamlined glide. For the first time in minutes, Star looks up from the words in her hand to see the powerful bird pounce on the tiny creature, driving its beak deep into the back of its neck. Like most of the kills Star has witnessed in the wild, this one happens in slow motion. She can hear the mouse’s vertebrae snap like a toothpick. She pinpoints the millisecond its pink kernel-sized feet go limp, and hears the ripping squish of the rodent’s insides being inhaled by her new friend.

As the falcon devours the body of the field mouse, Star can’t help but empathize with both parties, the attacker and the attacked, the predator and its prey. She knows what it means to be both things, sometimes all at once. It’s the future reality of humankind’s demise. The downfall of everyone but Star and her family. “They will devour themselves, and we will remain,” her dad likes to say. “They will perish and we will live. We will be free. We will rebuild.” These are words Star was raised on.

She has forgotten to question why her parents haven’t come to help her, to at least see that she’s alive. She’s too enamored with the bird, her aviary friend with a corpse pinned beneath its leathery yellow feet, ripping deeper into what was once a running, breathing thing. Finally, she feels strong enough to sit up, using the backside of her legs, fused into the mud, as a foundation on which to pull her torso toward her feet. She props herself up on her right elbow and reexamines the sheet of see-through paper.

The poem breathes life into Star. Someone is singing for her, crying for her, tracking her like a stray coyote tracks its pack at night, sniffing them out, snout to the brush, eager to return to the ones with whom she belongs. Who is singing just for me? Star wonders, running her thumb over the dried ink. With this cryptic note, Star suddenly feels less alone than she ever has before. She looks deep into the falcon’s eyes and asks the one question on her mind: “Who sent you?”

Thanks for reading.

Stay tuned for Chapter 2 — coming soon.

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If Star had been born within the expected confines of society, she probably would have visited an amusement park at least once.

Maybe with friends. Or on a school trip for soon-to-be-graduates. Or even with her parents during a down-and-back weekend road-trip. Regardless, she would have spotted the rollercoasters from the interstate and worshiped the giant metal structures as they grew larger, twisting high above their lowly surroundings.

Like all daring kids, she would have begged to ride the tallest, fastest ride first. Embracing the raw thrill churning in her gut. Waiting impatiently for her turn in an endless line, until the pimply teenager in a sweat-stained Thrillville employee uniform slammed the metal bar over her sunburnt thighs.

“Good luck, don’t die,” he’d spit, with unexpected Barry White bravado and an oversized Adam’s apple rising and falling in his throat, pleased to witness a bulb of excited terror bloom in the young girl’s eyes.

If Star had grown up in a normal family, she might connect the memory of her initial rollercoaster ride to the first time she ever heard a vinyl record. On the cusp of her 21st birthday, seated on the floor of a dingy motel room, somewhere off barren interstate, sharing space with a milk crate filled with vintage albums and a red portable turntable bequeathed to her by an estranged uncle named Roddy.

But Star isn’t good at making comparisons the rest of us would understand. Not to rollercoasters, or road-trips, or long lines, or pimply pubescent carnie boys. She’s never seen an amusement park, she’s never waited in a line, and she’s never met a boy (or a carnie). She’s never listened to an 8-track, a CD, or an MP3. And until spinning her first vinyl record, she’d never heard a song played by a human.

The only songs Star knows come from the wild inhabitants of Ghost Town, her family’s doomsday fringe-dwelling located in a remote corner of the California desert: the hollow buzz of a rattler; a kit fox’s throaty coo; coyotes howling in the dark; skittish ground squirrels chirping at dawn; a meadowlark bellowing its disjointed jingle from a sturdy fence post.

For most of her short life, these are the only songs that echoed through the skinny bones of Star Annabella Chaser.

But when Uncle Roddy posthumously inserted himself into the folds of his niece’s bizarre, isolated life, the world of recorded music became more than just a mystery to the lonesome desert girl. A vast void morphed into a sturdy rope of chain linking Star to a shared history of human expression. The unheard songs, the undiscovered records, all that sonic magic — it’s become one sharp slab of un-struck flint to the exquisite furnace of Star’s soul, a furnace desperate to burn.

So. Describing the mere milliseconds in which Star’s imaginary rollercoaster cart crests its apex, ticking forward under the spell of gravity’s weighty insistence, just before the hair-whipping plunge — this might actually be the simplest way to describe to you, someone who presumably grew up within the confines of society, a normal family etc. etc., what it was like for the lonesome desert girl to hear the static of the needle as it slid slowly from the far edge of Lee Oskar’s 1976 debut solo record like a figure skate on black ice until finally dropping effortlessly into the wide groove of Track One.

Stay tuned for Chapter 1, featuring Roddy’s will and testament, a Peregrin falcon, a musical baptism, a doomsday bunker, ash-filled joints, groovy t-shirt models and more!

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