i. Taza

(Lodged in the fading paragraphs of one of my seventh graders' stories was the first line of this story. We all liked it so much, we used it as a prompt for a whole series of stories, most of us incorporating it as our first line. A few, wonderfully, used it as their first and last lines. I didn't get a chance to play with it in class, but here's my take. Just a beginning; it ain't done.)

Heroically, they wandered off into the desert, wary of the unseen dangers of the terrain.

There were three of us. The man with the diamond eye, the beggar, and me. At times I felt them close by, at times I felt them as part of me; other times I felt the raging pain in my head as distance beyond compare.

We cared for each other: tended morning fires, listened for wind, caressed memories from depths long thought dead.

In this desert, to our surprise, there was no dead. The tangle was all ours, striated within our granite skulls.

I left to tend the wind. There were none who would find me. Those I left entirely. The ghosts of machines gone bad. Wisdom is disarray, my heart was challenged to return and exhume the rest.

The beggar lay face down in the sands. A crooked soul, ghastly beyond reason, positively radiant in his desolation. He offered the bread in his hand, as if I were the vagrant soul in our midst.

“What is food to me?” he said.

I had no answer.

Without invitation, he picked up his load and followed me. First at a distance, then the stench of him walked boldly beside me. He seemed oblivious to his hideousness.

In this, he was a thing—a man—of beauty.

The diamond was just that. The first time I met the other, he pulled it from his socket and handed it right to me. Bid me take it, keep it, even, though there was not the heart in me to keep another man’s treasure.

“More’s the pity,” he said. “What do I need of it?”

“And what need I?” I replied.

“It isn’t obvious to you?”

I felt a crawling in my gut, thinking, Please don’t tell me—

He showed me, instead. Early morning, leagues outside Taza, the Rif staggering in the morning light, I thought myself in the presence of All That is Holy. He laughed and stomped off into the dunes, kicked the beggar out of his meditations and ablutions. His was a cruelty not spared on either of us. He was not without compassion, but he seemed bent on passionate ridicule. I felt sure Life would harm him soon, if not either of us.

My mendicant was far more patient than I; in truth, it was only I raging: Fas—for that was his name—took his abuse in stride, as if the Diamond Man’s blows landed on an entirely different body, if any body at all.

I woke another morning with him seated on my chest. He stank of days without bathing, though we had in fact bathed just the day before.

“You dream of nothing,” he said. Spat the words out.

“I have not dreamt for years. They do not hold.”

“The sweet earth is wasted on you.”

“For this you sit on me, to stink into my morning light?”

"I sit on you, because you are rubbish.”

Days of this, ritual desecration. I was reduced to ashes, as daily he piled the brands upon me, burning through to my mind’s crust. In time, I could not lift myself beyond despair. This is when he laughed loudest, crushing in his derision.

“There is . . . no . . . beauty in you.”

“Why do you stay?”

“Foolish man.”

“Foo—”

“I am your Angel of Death.”