Sada walked. Stumbled may have been a better term, but terminology was rather irrelevant when one was on the verge of death. Anyway. Sada walked.
“Fuckin hot,” he wheezed (it had been hot, it would continue to be hot, but what else did you have to say when it had been hot for so long and would, for all you knew, continue to be hot indefinitely?). He was beginning to think that the divine or demonic forces of the universe would not let him die. Beginning was wrong; but he had spent so much time walking, and the sand was so endless, that there really was no way to judge time. He had long passed the state of dehydration in which one begins to hallucinate, or he thought so, anyway, but how did you know you were hallucinating? Life seemed like a big hallucination. Life might be one big hallucination. Who could say otherwise? He couldn’t. Had anything he thought happened even happen? Had it always been sand and walking and pain? Were those memories real? What did it mean to remember, if the mind was a prison in the hallucination of life? Maybe this was the blood loss Was he still bleeding? He didn’t know. Sada felt like all the water had been drunk up by the sun (sip sip sip) and if somebody cut him from end to end his insides would just look like baked clay. Pottery! Imagine. The ancients sure did! Man was made of clay, that’s right. Silly ancients. Where was the clay, anyway? Maybe it was just cursed man’s guts. Present situation! Yes sir, right away sir. “I’m walking around the desert with a magic knife in my leg.”
“So it goes.”
It would have been more interesting to say that “the air shifted” or “the atmosphere shuddered” or “magic buzzed in his veins” or even that the landscape looked different, but, in all honesty, Sada had no idea that he was on a completely different realm of existence until the vultures changed. Falsely, Sada would claim that nothing so interesting ever happened to him, although if his experience were merely illusions of the mind-prison-hallucination we all may or may not be living, that statement might be true.
He ignored their circling, as he had been for however long. In all this time, nobody had tried to eat him alive. For shame.
He heard one cry, and it was then that he started to think that this might be somewhere else. Sada looked up at the sky. They all looked the same so far up, but he knew the sound was different. “Now I’m hallucinating, must be. Different vultures. More likely to be songbirds than-“ he erupted into a coughing fit, surprise choking him like a certain kind of lover- “HELLO!” He croak-screamed. He sounded like the new vultures. Or was it the old ones? Songbirds, maybe. Vultures could be songbirds in somebody's book. "In mine, yeah." The stranger in the distance might have been too far to hear him shout, but the desert was awfully quiet (always had been, always would be.)
A vulture cried.
