PER CEPTION                                                                                                                            THE BLABBERMOUTH

A HELL OF SAND

    ...I could see nothing but fire-like yellow and whitish blue: sand below my feet and air above my head. The parched wind made the grains of sand pile on one another, and its irritating sound made me sweat even more drastically. My smell was that of sour stew, but my tongue could only taste the flavour of my own saliva. I was trembling of heat, and my naked feet were beginning to go numb due to the malleable runniness of the terrain.

        I was a zombie myself, a babbling creature without mind or soul, just faint skin, stinging flesh and wooden bones. A tall cactus ahead reminded me of my own condition, a static monument of prickles waiting for someone to pass by. It was light green and had two bulging arms that invited me to stop and look at, like a police agent controlling a traffic jam, but this time there weren't any vehicles or pedestrians, just me. Then I reckoned that the reason for such an untouchable thorned-column to be standing there was the regulation of the grains of sand being driven to and fro by the wind.

        Suddenly, where both ground and sky merge into a blurred, greyish line, I could distinguish a long wall of rocks making a large shadow onto some distant dunes. My graveyard, I felt. But as my clumsy steps pushed me forward, I noticed that the wall started to mould in shapes and colours, like the clothes in a washing machine slowing down its rotary movement. A town, fortunately. But as empty and eaten away as the cavity of my skull...