Charades in Nuclear Winter

She doesn’t know

where to start when crafting a desert, with which grain of sand, which tired and windblown surface, and how to describe the entirety of it all, when a desert is merely empty.

She tries to create

some point of reference, crafts a lake, dry lake, cracked and flaking salt flats like chapped lips. Just another kind of desert with new spaces for reminding herself, all too clearly, how she can’t seem to make the desert she wants.

            She will add a river

somewhere hidden from sight, so there is something to desire, so that they might go on, and if they ever find it, something to follow. She thinks a desert makes one yearn for life, and the people have to think they are getting closer to some sort of comfort.           

She doesn’t know

when she decided to create the people, how long into her process, but she knows she placed them there because a desert loses people, and it makes them question their senses and direction. She knows a desert can’t be empty if there aren’t any people in it to become lost.

            She won’t succeed

until the people feel lonely and overwhelmed with the task of living and finding a future in a God forsaken desert with a single river running through it, until they know the inescapable loneliness of her desert as God’s word.