Desolate

His eyelids fluttered. Grains of sand blanketed his eyelashes; scraping his eyes as he strained to pry them open. His vision was blurred, and a coursing pain rang through his head. A wavy sea of umber surrounded him.

He blinked with the force of a baby’s grasp. He squeezed his eyes shut, then open again. His vision cleared only a moment before the haze returned. His chest was heavy, and a searing pain traveled down his neck and into his back.

He coughed an aching, dry cough. One cough, and sand traveled from his throat down into his lungs. He gasped for air, making his first attempt to raise his hand to his chest. A dizzy spell came over him. He tried to raise his arm again, but the might of soiled earth weighed him down.

In a moment of clarity, he realized he was in the desert. Buried in the sand, packed tightly around him, up to his neck. Trapped in a body cast of soiled, brown, desert clay and to his dismay, it was nearly nightfall.

A storm roared above his head and lightening flashed across the bronze sky. Squinting his eyes with tensity, he struggled to see what was ahead of him, but his blurry vision returned. Sand danced and wailed around him as a wall of billowing dust, miles into the atmosphere, approached.

His eyes widened. The majestic, menacing force of nature hurled toward him. In a blink, the sun lost its bout to darkness and disappeared beneath the mountains.

The ominous cloud of sand barreled closer, and a flash of lightening illuminated it, in one last dance across the horizon. He closed his eyes and braced himself for what was to come. Would he be buried beneath it, or would he survive?