fourth dimension for timeout was over. If there were a rock to climb she 'd climb it, and what a rock it was. On a bright spring morning its phantasma cast out across the desert for miles. At sunset its umbra left the globe to cut the sky in one-half. It was Tse Bitai, as the Navajo called it, the Winged picket of the Four recess, the neat Ship rock. Even at noon in the paschal week it threw out a saw-toothed penumbra, a Clovis percentage point aimed at earth. It defied time and night itself.

She 'd been lazy today, tired of looking at flowers, so barehanded up the sheer breccia tug she 'd go up, just for the fun of it. Its fount was a 5.10 non-trad pump, if you can imagine, but up the lithe petty botanist had ascended like a leaf in an updraft, not the full 17 hundred feet, of course, nobody can do that ; this skilled Cy Young cleaning woman had gone up only as far she could, where, luckily, she had happened upon a cheery belittled rock 'n' roll strewn cwm at about 66 understructure, garnished with a lone marvellous Golden Mariposa. She had been too tired to wonder why it was there, growing out of John Rock, though it had been her job to wonder why.

She had had been working hard, and she needed a few winks.

She curled up on the side of this red Olimbos, uncaring of her unkempt iron-oxide hair, and in the leap warmth, drifting, her drowsy moss-green-gray ouzel rolled back -- oh ! -- a start and a sleepy coup d'oeil ... her centre rolled back then to gaze upon dreamland. Draped on the precipice and as careless as a kitten asleep in the genital organ of a tree, there held warmly by her stony Pietà, she floated into recondite slumber. Blanketed in Sol 's puff, the five-and-a-half understructure amazon, cradeled in the soil of trance, watched herself, as dreamers do, dawdling in a different Land without Adam. She eyed herself searching for a flannel lily in a garden of pink Carolina Phlox. She surveyed her avatar as it dandled the puple floweres, so delicate, so uncommon, an Ipomopsis sanct-spiritus offered up to her in the Sangre de Cristos, alive only in the Holy wraith canon.

She, lost in a welter of drifting double and unaware of the cholla and Prickly Pair and slithering risk in the fatherland below her serenity, now dreamt she heard Moki 's remote barking urging her to get home. He seemed so real -- and he had been talking to her earlier but she could n't sympathise -- and, and -- but his entreaties -- and, and -- he had become garbled, muffled as a penitent 's prayer in a ness Hatteras hurricane, or murmers, as if by her confection and frail and Baptist, cryptic Southern, Miss nanna Smith.

'' Moki ! '' It was the alarm-bark going off, rousing her with the unwilling importunity of a schoolgirl waking late for the bus. It was Mom's hastiness up call. Now ! Moki needed his water. Now ! A botanist needed her employment ! Now ! ( Well, mostly. ) The field sketch was supposed to be done today. Get it done, young lady. Now ! Relocate that Calypso bulbosa. Find that seep. Go ! Wake up !

'' Ohhhhh, I 'm coming '', she moaned to herself. She rolled onto her breadbasket and elongated into a work-shy feline reach, her skin a pink tabby of weal from her rock-sand bedframe. She had dreamt, or had she imagined it, hmmm, not sure enough, or had she just now remembered some glutinous North Carolina summer six years ago ? Parties and political sympathies, beer, philosophy and sex before graduation, love and baby, and the drip mold of common salt her tongue had wiped from her young Quaker 's member. She droopily glanced over her shoulder at the extensive Navajo field below and took a saltiness slug from her muskeg forearm. She nuzzled it, trying to recapture the discernment of him and the grievous sweet olfactory property of his upraised arm, but it was not he. She had turned tail on beloved with a man. She was self-employed person : It was her nature.

She rolled onto her keister and sprang up --

'' C'mon Susan, get moving '', she growled under her breath, and in a quick salutation she shaded her eyes just as a Captain surveys the horizon above the everlasting seas. She imagined the San Juan basin 's misty rises and table to be frosty dude which were never to go down upon this Galleon of the Desert, though they shimmered and rolled in the spring 's sun warmed eddies. They spread across the Earth's surface of an immobile ocean, still but for the Antilocapra americana detritus drifting upon it. This great sparkling desert lagune enfolded her Great Ship and she felt safety upon its high deck.

'' Hey ! '' she cried out. She spied that seep she had been looking for all morning, and it was right over there in a little arroyo, only a 660 yard dash away from the capital titan's metrical foot. Strange there would be slickrock nearby, considering the geology of the place, but hey, who was she to argue with creative activity 's macrocosm ?

So, armed with the survey of the urine above the firmament, she decided to go to the amniotic fluid below it. She wanted to hurry. She was tired and she wanted to go dwelling. She had been in the playing area for six week by now.

'' You bet, '' she chortled in time with her syncopate persuasion, `` gibe it out and thy storage-battery grid be done, eh Professor ? Find the flower, just receive the flower and get some Ph.D. smiles, huh ? A tub too ! Get paid -- money, yeah, money, money ! Yup. well Life. Warm tub ? Yeah, oh you bet, bed bathtub and beyond. ``

Deciding to go she stepped over the boundary of the sheer crag and peered straight down. `` Do n't rock-a-bye with vertigo now -- be very measured -- '' she warned herself, and checked her route descending. It was only a 5.5 jumble, much sluttish than mom jugful over at Très Piedras and -look- there was Moki right there down below, really not all that small when viewed from way up here and sounding like he was yaowling from as conclusion as the cellar step. Why was it, she wondered, that high seems so much higher than long seems long ? She was only lxvi feet up, but what a free fall. On the level ground she could have crossed it in merely nine or ten bounds.

'' I guess we really are n't supposed to leave this trade good earth '' she pondered. For all she knew heaven might be only as senior high as a promenade across the garden is distant. In any case it was too far to jump off with only beat-up kneepads to soften the fall, and only Angels can fly, as everybody knows, for goodness rice beer. The kneepads were for tonight anyway. There were also 1600 feet of intimidating stone standing erect behind her, and Moki was being just as insistently loud in any management. It was prison term to thrust off.

Moki, as in Mookie Wookie, Chucky Chookie, Dookie Dookie was an Aboriginal Australian Shepherd, called an Aussie by most, a midsized dog. This one was a midget of a man clad in a shiny black McIntosh, the shoulder joint over which his female parent had casually thrown a Edward Douglas White Jr. furry stole. For color, she had given him one eye of embrown and the other of blasphemous, and had added a dollop of copper above each for good luck. His young owner loved his colors. But mostly, she loved his friendship and his dedication. She was comfortable with his size of it, too. She had come to hate big ugly frank ever since her Dad 's Mastiff had torn and tortured her and taken her from the straw man a tenacious time ago.

'' Hey Mook ! I 'm comin'!"she yelled. She could n't tell if he had heard her or not. Seemingly the Saami updraft that carried his implorations up to her forfend hers to him, as if the Seraphim had come to bat them away.

So : Down : quickly. This Tomb freebooter of the sky had awakened to her catamenial metre and the pressure of her monthly rhythm. Soon, blood would flow from the seep of her uterus and mediate her unresolved leg, when her fiddling prince would feed the large number of his lusts. She was obligated. It was her speech rhythm. It was her nature.

'' Well, let 's go, '' she thought. `` Why is it always easier to go down than to climb up up ? '' She slung her backpack over her camisole -- Ow ! a trivial sunburn. `` Ha, a niggling passion for a farseeing common cold naked night '', she thought was a sly smile.

Eyeing the route again, she swung around and cast her air-sleeve and Swooshes over the boundary as nonchalantly as stepping onto a New York fervency escape valve. It was soft purchase, but her firstly step would be a wide stint to the right wing. No problem, though, so she opened her wooden leg and -- whee -- a comfort of updraft fingered up her breechclout shorts. It was the cool tinge of a fisherman 's hand ; and it lifted the odour of her own bait to her. The chilly touch hurried her on. She noted the sun had swung to the west.

So, being a woman who judges while she works, and therefore always seems to see ahead, she leapt from jag to jag like a cougar mounting a rooftree. Each jump she took in the huff and puff was a jump of trust, an utter joy of flight, as rubber as Icarus at midnight.

'' -- But say : be deliberate ! Think. A living dog is wagerer than a dead lion, y'know. You're no eagle with a nest among the stars, adult female. Test first. Cling blotto. Master Moki. Sex tonight. Now go. Third of the way, one-half of the way, most of the way down, daunt away, prance away, mordant furry down, and -- Oh rats ! ``

Here she came to a ledge, just all-encompassing enough to creep along. A shiner scurrying along a shelf would go faster. Should she accept it on all quadruplet or creep along clutching the wall ? She reflected a instant. Her haversack might throw her off balance, and she still had to talk terms an outthrust at the end, so in one movement she slid it off and pitched it down over the side. It was no ritual killing. By now she was only 20 feet above the desert floor and there was n't anything in it that would get around -- except ... Moki !

'' Wow. Are you okay, Mook ? '' She looked down and bellowed with vexation. He could 've been sitting under a balcony when the affair came down like a bomb calorimeter and nearly brained him. He had jumped six feet out of his peel and was scurrying around picking up bits and pieces, but otherwise he seemed fine. When he looked up, though, he seemed to say to her that she would get hers later.

'' What did you say to me ? '' she rasped as she tilted her head like a bobcat eyeing a vole. `` You know, I could stay up here for ever if I wanted to, and there 's nada you could do about it. New Mexico is full of cute petty Chihuahuas, but there 's only one of me. '' Then, when she flicked her pony butt as extra defiance, by God, if he did n't twinkle back at her, or maybe it was just a natural state hair, who knows ?

fountainhead, inch along it was going to be. The lady climber squished against the bulwark, kneading the careen. A breakout here could be difficulty. She had to be sure of her clutch. This was her last caress of the titan so as a adios it puffed detritus into her mouth and made her swallow. `` A little too a good deal salt of the Earth '', she thought.

Cautiously, she tread to the rightfield. The rubble which had settled on the ledge yesterday or millennia ago looked to be as fine as child powder and may make been just as slippery, so with each coffin nail smushing stride she ground her tenneys down to bedrock. It was n't punk going, but she attended to each placement of bridge player and base, looking both up and then down like a bored parishioner at prayer. As she did, her nodding crib tail feather-dusted the excess crock from her pink spiritualist back and tickled the spot that the knapsack had irritated. It foretold of a velvety stole that would fondle her later that night, and she juiced a slight, like the seep, the damp where a mother 's flower becomes a seed.

fountainhead, here she was at the outcrop with Moki barking teaching from below. sin, there was no need for all that disturbance. Brother, howling like a man who has abandoned all hope. Come on. Gees.

'' Awright, awright, entertain your pants on '', she grumbled her irritation."I 'll be there in a second. '' She would have to concentrate to get around this jut, and she did n't require some inhuman screeching in her ear. Out she stretched into the aether, all sixty-six inch of her, until her limbs were as taught as a bosque Cottonwood. Ah. There. terms, blind it was, but footing. Now all she had to do was circumnavigate this thing by slithering around its al-Qaida. Not hard, but ouuuuu, the breccia gouged and pinched and scratched at her tits like a sadistic lover. She was felicitous her titty were n't all that big : The way they were compressed, a couple of springy boobs would uncoil and sproing her rightfulness into the under world.

Now it was only six jumps rock to rock, and she would be at her Master 's door. Bounce. Bouncy. Bounce. By now she was so dusty she poofed like an open bottle of talcum powder. bounciness. Bounce -- whoa ! -- a little far that last one. Her sudden stop made her rock music and careen for balance and flail like a kitten at a baptism. unbendable, steady now. This next jump would take in to be a four-point landing. She crouched, this great Lioness, this noble Huntress, this Fearsome piranha. Her loins a-quiver, muscles taut for the kill, eye fixed on the prey, she pou- ... `` Awwwwww ''.

'' Moki ! Move -- you 're in the way. '' She sounded more dumbfound than angry. Why was he right there anyway ? `` Come on Mook, move. Mooooove, pleeeze. '' She waved him off like a bad landing on a carrier. He was loth. Then it dawned on her, of course : He could smack her, and probably he had smelled her all the way down the expression. Sure, that was it. They had been at this current camp, no Thomas More than a tank and an icky old sleeping bag on the ground, for six mean solar day already. He didn't smell so bad, for a dog or an eidolon anyway, but comely Susan was so dirty she looked like a piece of basalt and reeked like a clod of sulfur. All the salutary for him, though ; she was just the way he liked her : She stank to high Heaven.

'' okay, a little Sir Thomas More '', she kept waving `` okay, okay, more if you want'a bite of this orchard apple tree of your eye. Just one More footmark -- good. '' He was out of the way. `` Okay, here I come ! okeh ?"She waggled."OK. Okay, here I come. !"

She sprang like a lynx ...

Plop -- she alighted into a crouch right in front of him. `` miss me, big guy ? '' She almost meowed with Cheshire smiles. If anyone had had any dubiousness a yelp meant a yip yup, their reunion was nose to scent, eye to eye to eye, low n'brown n'green-gray n'scratch n'snuff n'snuff n'stuff, home for Christmas Day, graduation day, chocolate cow dung biscuit joy. They petted and panted. They wagged pony and puppy dog tailcoat ; they flounced and pounced, and popping open the final bottle of Evian from the backpack, they lapped it to the finish. So sate, they shared her scent, his fragrance, and their last supper of Fig Newtons. He showed some pink, and she grew damp : time to cease. Get to camp out. `` Not long '', she purred. She meant it. She gave her word. Thus he marked the dapple and off they went, his tail a flapping vestment, her backpack a trailing supplicant scraping across the desert floor.

The two finished the day in quiet. They had no real need to speak because it seemed each could imagine the early 's mentation. They were a team, after all, so well-trained that back in North Carolinas the two had been 3 Flyball title-holder, founding father of the squad The Bleu Bayous, in fact. She could charge him out of the gate and down the course with a wink and a nod, and he would respond instantly. At his crest Moki had run the course of instruction in 15:36, a near state phonograph recording. God, they had been soundly. They had just loved showing off in front line of a crowd of brilliant and caring, shining, admiring middle, Creator, oh yes they did ; but after a while he had lost a step and a second, and then he had lost some more. It was n't fun anymore, he seemed to say, and Susan had agreed.

Anyway, for a no-nonsense kind of girl like her, Botanical Survey, the stuff of the professoriate, was so much more fulfill than had been Environmental Reclamation, with its mucking around in menses-red Carolina gumbo, steaming with who-knows-what toxins, with its spying on sweltering, stinking pig farms and their proprietor, and with her jacking off overheated North Carolinian undergrads during awkward evenings'diversionary attack. The desert, on the other hand, she knew to be pure in its dry contrasts of people of colour and spark, hot and cold, good and evil. It left no uncertainty. That was its nature.

The two made their way to the seep in no prison term, just in time. The sun was low and the desert 's casual breathing space was waning. Its last pouf waft cold : it 's legion 's cool hands stroked wavelets of fathead extrusion onto her nude weapons system and stage. The girl was n't tired now, but knowing she must stay defenseless for the succeeding many hr in Easter week chill already had turned her consistence languid. She longed for the toasty glow of her brilliantly afternoon nap, the cuddle-up warmness of her bedroll -- `` trumpery. C'mom. focussing -- '' she scolded herself.

She knew she must put all of that out of her mind, warmth, softness, goodness, and such. She must suffer in the cold tonight. She must become a Piscean sacrifice there to feed some spiritual world throng. She had to. It was her nature now.

She was compelled. Once six years ago as a rebellious post-grad gamine, as just another eccentric summer romp to the Big City, then one smoggy August eve she had offered trunk and soul just for the fun of it. It had been a hazy, boozily spinning, offbeat kind of alkaloid ritual, just a unintelligent passionateness play gametic stunt when it started, when she had lain upon a Cross inside a pentagram on a New York rooftop. That 's all. That 's what she had thought then. That 's what she had thought then amid a vortex of Arabian tea'eyes and the perfume of Rosemary as she splayed out like an Ichthus scratched onto a Roman floor. That 's what the girlfriend had thought, wrongly, in her ignorance. There are no prayers uttered in jape, neither from a Gotham rooftop nor from the high school place of Tophet : So now she was obligated. Now she was compelled. She had sacrificed her innocence, so now she had an proprietor, so now she had a Watchdog.

She was driven on. She had to finish the work of the day to depart the piece of work of the night. With an burst of activity, she noted such things as fourth dimension, temperature, topology, GPS location, and surrounding flora. Thus absorb she had not noticed that the sundown had fired her Great rock into the craze of a covetous buff, turning its font red against the darkening sky. Just as the self-absorbed always seem to do, she remained oblivious until its reflect pink brightness cast an accusing finger of trace across her field notes as her pencil coupled with its varlet. So strong had been her inhabit place, however, her nest that had set in John Rock this break of the day, that the Winged Sentinel pulled at her and beckoned her to add up back. Sighing, she felt its wistful tug in the way a traveler remembers a goodbye osculation, but the Christ Within of the earthly concern was fading, still and all, and she had to complete her journey.

'' Here it is !"the young plant scientist proclaimed. Here in the slanting adumbration she spied what she had come to find. Peeking out from behind a tuft of the direful Tribulus terrestris, the noxious Goathead, and undistinguished but to the experienced eye, sprang the gossamer shoots of the lavender crowned Calypso orchid. They were so light-green smart and new, so small, tenuous and winsome she wondered if they must have grown in the land of Adam. In this seep, as the lily among the spikelet, sprouting in this moist cranny was proof that purity could brook alone among the slithering dangers in the land of Cholla and Prickly Pear….

"Of which vertu engendred is the flour"as her frail ol'grandma Kathryn Elizabeth Smith used to say. The girl smiled at the dear memory. `` With some April showers… I miss you Granny ... look down on me. '' She asked as she paused in a rumination that took no more time than a missed step.

'' Zip. Pow ! Done ! '' she bellowed, jabbing her fist upward in a power salutation."I'll be home tomorrow !"She snapped her notebook closed and plunked it into the backpack. `` Hallelujah ! '' The reverberation from the Big tilt was the last spoken word the little girl would listen until the next day when the Professor would travel up Route 666 from Gallup.

Unlike the robustious warmth of breezy midmorning, the stasis of night would demand gross quiet of her. She knew that. Of course, in the get-go had been the Word, and from her a entirely chatterbox wide, but in the internal hoop of darkness she would go too insensate to verbalise. The two, she and he, could finish the night in silence, though. They had done it before. They were a team, after all, and tonight he would be master, and manipulate her with a wink and a nod.

Moki, always impatient, knew how to push her along. Like a Centurion prodding a captive his perpetual bumping kept goosing his fiddling striver onward. Down in the arroyo, after they had crossed over a dry stream marked Cocytus on the storage-battery grid map, he halted the girlfriend and allowed her one look back at her loving, fading purple Ship rock music. Her work was done, and he must have known Susan would not exit this way again. Did he know that the pride of her heart had deceived her, she who had dwelt in the scissure of the rock, whose habituation had been high ; that she had said in her heart, `` Who shall bring me down to the priming ? '' Did she even know it herself ?

Up and out of the gloomy well he nuzzled her, and then he pulled on the haversack once, twice, three times. As on control his personal chattel revealed her collar, a simple gimmick of simpleness, which she presented to him as reverently as a chalice, as a Holy Grail. She raised it to her neck, and snapped it into piazza. It had no adornment except a `` D '' ring on a strap which hung down her breastplate, but it held in it the world-wide significance of compliance. He owned her.

Moki never wore a collar of course of study, but in sex she must. He knew his bitch never doubted it. He divined she never had to : they were a team, after all, so well trained that even short of camp, little more than than, really, a beat up sleeping bag and a tank perched on a rise, he could bump her to a plosive, sniff her to her back, force her pegleg apart, and as he had done often when they had been a-froggin'back east, roll in her carp to conceal his own smell. He would be quick though, with his perfuming ritual, brief this evening, because tonight not even this unhallowed choreographer could defy time and Nox itself. He had obligations too. He was as ed as instinct, without the choice his co-star may have had just this morning. His glowering little film noir had a firm play date and it was plotted under a starless proscenium, so he nipped her up and onward toward that stinky old sleeping bag, her ill-lit stage. He pranced her along, salivating less with intelligence agency than with the Pavlovian expectancy of the specticle to come. Could he project this child 's comedic shakings as a charade of a girlfriend shivering to destruction, or did he forecast the future in the way the soulless always seem to do ? He had come to expect her infantile groan, those faminiar delicious soliloquies of icy suffering, but in the end it did not matter, neither to him, nor to the unhearing deep brown macrocosm above, nor any longer to the Great Rock, near but forgotten.

-- -- And the awarding goes to ... well done. bravo ! Encore ! -- -- Good boy. Nice puppy.

The Sun was dying over the edge of the worldly concern, so it was less than night and less than day in camp. Red was grim ; albumen was Asa Gray. Against creation 's utmost burn Moki observed his little bitch puff into the stable evening air checking to see her breather, judging the temperature thereby. Not crisp tonight, he saw, not yet anyway, but soon it would be too dark to tell even with her moss-green-grays, or with his Amytal and brown, with a dollip of pig. They were a squad, however, these two, so with a wink and a nod he had her unfurl the mise-en-scene where he would stage her, -- crackle china and Fwap ! -- She did so with such a fly-cast snap fastener he started aback a few feet. He steadied though, when his fading bratling fished into her packsack for her kneepads and then landed them home with an authoritative Velcro compaction. She seemed so unhesitating, so self-assured, so almost eagre, knowing what was to occur. Was there something he did not know ? Could she defy meter and the Nox itself ?

He watched as the young lady dimmed to an spectre in the evening 's gold glow. To him all became grey as all becomes gray to those without a soul. His centre could no longer postdate her as she flicked off her Kleenex shorts and tissue camisole. They vanished into the support black. His world had become flat now and she was without contrast. Her lilt mons pubis was all he could see of her in the breathless din. He watched her blend into a floating detritus on a murky laguna as she became merely a Triangulum of black sex hovering disembodied over a dark unappeasable sea. Her eyes were gone and she had no shape. Thus this fearsome schoolmistress of the Day who while she had the igniter, believed in the spark, that she might be a shaver of the brightness level, in his macrocosm clotted into a saturnine gelid casing of fishy incense, rotting taste, and tender slit only.

In starlessness the forefather would breed her. He would clobber her perineum. He would bloody her cervix. He would make her bleat like a demon if he wanted to. He would degrade this formless breathless child on a blackened level in an unseen coliseum beside the Winged picket of Heaven. He would tie with her for hours, in his pleasure letting her freeze before a crowd of uncaring obsidian eyes. He had to. He was obligated. He was compelled. It was his nature.

Epilogue

fourth dimension has slipped away from me, 15 years since I wrote the allegory. I have defied under clip nor night itself, nor its infirmities.

Just as in computer memory the narrative and the wish become one, so its passions and meanings blend to and indistinct whole. What did the story mean ?



Did she survive that night ?

The professor found her mid-morning the next day, laying spreadeagle and nude on that ratty old backpack. She was groggy and incoherent. She remembered only insensate darkness and a intuitive feeling of being adrift throughout the dark. Moki was lounging about 60 M away, placidity, but watching as always.

This he told me in an email, not in a school text, a few months later.

The professor mentioned that he had wrapped Susan in some blankets, revived her with a swill of Old Gawdawful, and washed her groundwork as best he could. He said he rushed her to San Juan Regional in Farmington, where she recovered within a few twenty-four hours.

The professor brought her abode to the McDonald cattle ranch in the Jornada del Muerto to regain her strength. She left him six years later, trusting Moki to his precaution. She said she had things to do in Frederick North Carolina and would call soon. He never heard from her again.

Moki lived on for a while, but died somewhere on the ranch outside of Alamogordo. The prof said he had died from a horde of distempers, but I infer that he had shot him.

The prof too, has gone missing. I tried to contact him terminal Easter to distinguish him that I may have found Susan on Facebook, wrongly, as it turns out, but he has left the college, and his IP address, so the supplier tells me, never existed. His ranch wasn't a cattle farm at all anymore, but was part of a government property.

He was a mystery. I wish I had known him better.

I don't jazz what happened to Susan.

The main road from Gallop has been renamed .