Edith shuffled slowly across the house, holding an old wooden broom and humming, “How Great Thou Art,” a church hymn she learned when she was a little girl. She swept the dust from the floorboards into little mounds and pushed the mounds together near the door. She eased the rusted screen door open with her hip and brushed the pile of dust out of the house. It billowed into a brown cloud and hung in the air for a few seconds, but then the dust all settled down on the small porch. She didn’t bother sweeping off the porch.
“One breeze of wind and it’ll be coated anyway,” she thought to herself, still humming the hymn.
When through the woods and forest glades I wander and hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees.
Edith turned to go back into the house, but stopped. She rested the broom on the wall next to the doorframe. She walked to the single step off of her porch and sat down. Her dress was already dusty, so she didn’t mind the coating on the porch.
A raindrop hit the ground in front of her and was instantly consumed by the dry desert sand. The only thing left from the drop was and tiny gray circle. She could faintly hear more raindrops falling on the tin roof of the house, giving a pitter-patter beat to the hymn she was humming.
Looking up to the sky, Edith saw the clouds churning and swirling. They teased her by dropping just a few raindrops. She grimaced at the clouds and imagined that the racing clouds were grimacing back at her. Both she and the sky knew that the little rain that fell couldn’t do anything to salvage the land, or her parched skin.
When I look down from lofty mountain grandeur and hear the brook, and feel he gentle breeze.
Her eyes fell from the sky to the horizon. She could see where the line of clouds broke, casting a line of sunlight on the desert. She eyed one point on the horizon, swearing that there used to be a tree there. But now there was nothing. No birds flew over the house anymore. No little horned lizards slid their way under the boards of the porch to escape the sun. The clouds even fled from the desert, gliding over the desolate land as fast as they could. The only things left were the dust, the little gray circles leftover from the tease of a rainstorm, and this house.
And a thin, slick rattlesnake that slid across the dust towards Edith. She resisted the urge to jump back and run back into the house. The snake lifted its head and pulled its neck close to its body. Edith heard the subtle rattling from the snake’s tail. She traced the diamonds on the back of the snake with her eyes. The intricate designs were transfixing. The colors of the desert: the gray of the sky, the tan color of the ground, and the dull green of the cacti all weaved in and out of each other in lines on the snake’s back.

She laughed a little to herself, amused that she found beauty in what most people saw as the most dangerous thing in the desert.

“You’re not as bad as everyone makes you out to be, are you?” Edith said the snake, softly. It only rattled in response. “Well, at least to me you aren’t. You’re going to help me.” A single drop of rain fell and hit the top of Edith’s bare foot. Very gently, she slid her toes closer and closer to the snake.
But then she stopped. She felt the wind pick up. She heard what sounded like someone whispering gibberish into her ear. Without pulling her foot from away from the snake, she turned her head towards the sound. In the distance, a giant red wall had arisen up all the way to the angry sky. The giant red wall was moving, too – and headed straight for her.

Edith didn’t move, she just sat and watched the dust storm come screaming at her and her little house. She imagined the wall of dust hitting her. It roaring in her ears and hitting her body like a brick. She imagined it blowing on the house so hard that it would fall apart. She imagined the dust taking her away. The screen door flew open and slammed against the wall, and not from the wind. Aaron, Edith’s husband took one step out on the porch and yelled at her. The piercing howl of the wind carried his voice away.
He hurried to her side and touched her shoulder, trying again to call to her. He saw the snake when he looked down and his wife’s foot so close to the serpent. Without hesitation, he grabbed his wife’s arm and tried to pull her up, and to kick the snake away from his wife’s foot.
She grabbed the edge of the porch with her thin fingers and held on for dear life. He tugged, but she wouldn’t budge. Aaron tried again to yell to her, but she either couldn’t hear him or pretended not to.

Angrily, Aaron released his grasp from her arm and instead wrapped his arms around her thick waist. The small hairs on the back of his neck stood on end and grit forced it’s way into his stinging eyes, yet he managed to to pry her away from the boards and once he had her, firmly in his grasp, she unclenched her fingers and let him take her into the house, a limp and heavy weight in his arms, without a fight. Edith saw the tail of the snake disappear under the porch.

Aaron put Edith down roughly in a wooden chair placed up against the wall. She watched him She watched him fly from window to window, closing the blinds, slamming boards against the shutters, like a bee buzzing from flower to flower.
“I miss the flowers,” she thought.

Even with the curtains and doors closed, she could still feel the wind blowing in through the cracks in the house, pressing grains of sand against her skin, feeling the wind blowing straight through her. Her husband sat down in a chair on the opposite side of the room and looked at her. She looked back.

“What is wrong with you?” Her husband barked at her, looking at her straight in the eye, as if he could find the answer there.

“What’s the point anymore, Aaron?” She watched her husband lean back in his chair and throw his head back to rest it on the wall. She could practically see her words resonating in his head, bouncing from side to side.

She felt the snakes quiet energy, it’s fierce and silent power. Her jaws opened wide, as if to swallow the storm. “Stop thinking for a moment.” He didn’t break his eye contact with her. He didn’t move a muscle. “Aaron, no matter much you want it to be different, we are nothing, we have nothing, and we’re just going to blow away with all this dust. We got the short end of the straw. There is no point anymore.”

Aarons was shot upright, making Edith jump. “What’s the point? Have you lost it?!” He pointed an accusing finger at Edith’s stomach. “That right there is the point! You can’t just think about yourself anymore, Edith! It’s not just you you’re thinking for!”

“You think I don’t know that?” Edith yelled back. “I’m thinking about my life our lives plenty, and I know that we can’t keep going like this.”

Aaron pushed against the blinds, and covered the chinked holes in the wooden walls with his calloused hands. “We have to wait it out. There’s no going back now. We’re here and there’s nowhere to go.” Aaron deflated and took his hand from the wall, put his head in his hands, and felt the weight of what he just said.

“What did we do?” Edith said, more to herself that to Aaron.

“We messed up, that’s what we did. We took a chance. We picked up and left everything we knew. And this is what we got.” Aaron mumbled through his hands.

“The brochures showed this land, these hills as opportunity.”

“Well it’s not. And we just have to live with it.”

“I don’t want our child to grow up like this.”

“Neither do I. I would rather things be the way they were before we moved.”

“Me too.”

Edith and Aaron looked at each other from across the room as the house creaked and moaned. The sand scratched at the walls and the wind screamed through the cracks.

“Things are never going to be as good as they were, are they?” Edith asked.

Aaron dragged his chair across the room and sat next to his wife. “I don’t think so, honey. I don’t think so.” They looked into each other’s eyes and both realized the only piece of what they used to have was each other.