There wasn’t enough time before the last ship left.
There wasn’t even a word for the last ship.
He went anyways, because grandfather told him to go.
As they went, neither he or his grandfather knew the words anymore, they just set out from his house among the sands.
His great grandfather would say the words in his sleep but he was the last of the old ones that knew the words that the earth spoke, a child does not remember these things, the adult the child becomes does not remember. He sometimes a dream of his great grandfather saying the words to the last horse. The last horse he only saw in drawings on rocks in hidden canyons..
As they traveled across the dry lands, his grandfather would point to a dry hill and say that was once a great mountain and powerful gods once lived there. Gods that left because we stopped saying their names….
They would stop at the base of the hills, and his grandfather gathered handfuls of dry sand in a small bundle. Grandfather held it out and pressed it into his chest with his trembling ancient hands “you must take these grandson”…
Six times they stopped, passing miles of ruined houses, and the skeletons of ancient beasts. They had to steer around towering clouds of red sand that swirled high into that searing blue sky as the sun tried to stop them.
The voice of the sun echoed in bolts of blue lightening that challenged them in the forgotten words of the earth, as they drove on.
As they drove, the young man stopped for Grandfather, who would fall asleep between stories of mountains, forests and great oceans…
As grandfather slept, young man would walk the sand dunes, wandering about the great world that once was, that was now long behind him.
As he wandered, he gathered the dry branches of long dead trees, he pocketed pottery sherds and the flints of his ancient grandfathers. He gathered the special rocks when he found them, only because he knew that grandfather would say they were special, turquoise, obsidian, ocher,
He stumbled into canyons and would stare at the ceilings of crumbling caves and stare in awe at animals he never saw. Men hunted the ancient bighorns, women gave birth at the edges of now dried up rivers…
On some walls, he saw horses, cattle and trucks of his sazi, his great great great great grandfathers..
He never saw these things himself except in dreams..
It was said his great grandfather owned the last horse ever, and the last cows before they were swallowed by sand.
In the young man’s youth, his great-grandfather would become overcome with grief and sorrow, and would tremble when he spoke of them..
The sand came and no one did anything..
The people continued to destroy the world under their own feet.
Surely his sazi, the people who had once gone to the red moon and back, could change things, they would have an answer.
Questions were asked of the crumbling cinderblock houses in the desert, they were asked to the black paved lines that went nowhere…
No answers would echo back…
His grandfather told him about time, how even things with and end start over.
This is the last of this glittering world.. Now we start again in blackness…
Take these things, the mountains in the bundles, the pictures your parents drew, the rocks you gathered when you were young…
Take them into blackness, into space, and start again..
The young man had bags of sand and rock, he had recordings of songs on plates, he had paintings of ancient insects, he had the bones of ancient animals long dust., the pottery and flints of his sazi..
They raced to the last ship as his grandfather slept in his seat..
The young man knew what was going to happen, grandfather had already told him he would not leave.
It was up to him to take the memory of this place, the rocks, the pictures, the words and songs he knew and start again..
nezontherez 