A brief encounter with the spirits

The girl wept. The swirling sands filled the air, blocking out the light and harshly stinging her face. She could hear no sound except the howling desert wind around her. When she had gotten lost before, there had always been something to show her the way back; the great shadows across sprawling dunes, or her mother's clear and comforting voice bravely singing the old songs. Never had she felt so alone in her life, swallowed so entirely by the desert.

The girl remembered the stories her mother had told her when she was small to keep her from wandering off. The tales seemed impossible, the living souls of wanderers snatched from their bodies and eaten whole by devils who lived in the sand or danced about on the winds. “Cover your face and stay with the tribe,” her mother would say, “The spirits of air are wild and the spirits of earth have no mercy.”
The girl had laughed then, as is the way of the innocent. Though she was very small and the world very large, she did not yet know to be afraid. In youth, we know nothing beyond what we have seen, what we have touched, what we have felt. And when the girl had fallen behind in the past, had she not always made her way back to the tribe eventually? When she had ran ahead, did the tribe not find its way to her? For that matter, would the shaman go so often to pray alone if the sands truly held such danger?
Perhaps the shaman knew which dance was right to stay the spirits. Perhaps his amulets kept him from their sight. Perhaps the girl should have listened more carefully when the shaman taught.

The girl had no time left for “perhaps.” She no longer wept. Her every thought, every sense was filled with the pain of the burning sand. Though the very breath of life seemed just about to leave her body forever, she gasped out one last desperate prayer. All that was left in her memory, a song she had learned in her mother's arms all those years ago. Melody was beyond her, but the words felt clear even as their gasped sounds were lost to the winds. “Creator, look upon us. Creator, open the heavens.”
Her gasped words became choked, and her choked words became still, that soon nothing came from her throat but sand.
But the creator must have heard her, for first the girl felt a pain sharp as spears and then she found herself carried far above the earth on the trunk of a great palm tree.
Up, and up, and up she flew until at last the blue of the sky and the light from the creator's golden face shone all around her. Then suddenly down again, as the wind settled in defeat.
The girl landed hard, battered and near broken. The black of her skin could hardly be seen under all the sand that clung to her. After much struggle and hurt though, she had her breath back. The familiar voice of her mother rang out across the dunes in a calling song, thick with panic.


The spirits of air and earth would never harm the girl again, for from that day, she was always sure to cover her face and stay with the tribe.