Here’s the beginning of a short story I’ve been working on.
Mereá
The first thing that retreats before you is its name. Mereá, the city of winding caves. From a distance one sees only two lights shining out over the desert, marking her lair. There she slinks into dusk. No welcome to move further in and explore. These lights are not for guiding visitors through sage and scrub to the city’s entrance; she cannot stomach any more people.
Still he came back, looking for his wife who had been lost the year before. She had gone out to go look at the stars against all advice from their guides. She wanted to enjoy the coolness of the desert by herself, she said, and would only be gone for twenty minutes. He had waited an hour before becoming worried and getting a search party ready. That night they walked outward in a five-mile radius, calling his wife’s name. All that met them were jackal cries. They walked the same paths the next day, tried to see any trace of a human footprint in the sand. There was nothing. And then the storms came, and the guides said they had to move camp.
This time he came with no guides to slow his tracks. He had stayed in that country for a month after his wife’s disappearance, asking the surrounding villages if they had seen her, explaining that she was out on a walk and may have gotten lost. It was the time of carnival. Anything could have happened to her. But no, not just anything.
Mereá, they had said. His wife must have accidentally found the city underneath. He asked where it was, how he could contact the people there. They merely shook their heads, eyebrows furrowed as if to say the thing was never done. They only said Go home. Mereá has her now, and she has forgotten you and the sun and sand. Go home and find another wife who will not wander off.
He tried explaining that she would not so quickly forget her life and all whom she loved, but they just shook their heads again, a small laugh coming from one particular old man. The man came up close when passing by him, bent over, and whispered, You must look for her. His wife? That was what he was doing. No, not your wife. Mereá, you must find her first. Then, perhaps you will find your love, if Mereá lets you remember how.
He found the approximate location of their old camp, and as dusk shaded into indigo, he went for a walk, just as his wife had done. The air was beginning to chill and all he had seen were stars and sand, no strange cave or hole in which his wife may have wandered. He cried out his wife’s name several times, imagining her face as he last saw it, laughing at his worry, smiling a quick goodbye and I’ll see you in a few minutes.
At last he grew tired, laid himself down the desert floor and stared up at the sky. The world tilted before him as he stared; he felt as if he could drop straight through the stars and land on the other side. Slowly he closed his eyes, settled his breathing to take long, slow draughts of air. There was no wind, no noise. In that stillness, he began to walk. Some say that if one slows their breath to the point of dying, Mereá will come, will let your feet slide in between her eyes and find the first step. Some nights there are twenty stairs leading down into the heart of the plaza; other nights there are thirty. Or one-hundred. There are some who descend forever.






