Note of the Week 012

Here's a short excerpt from Taking Jezebel:

     “All right,” the warden said disinterestedly, “let’s go. It’s a long walk from here.”
     “No car?” Orson asked, half-joking but half-hoping there was one, rubbing his neck again, lips quivering.
     “No car.”
     Orson still pictured the faces of his sniggering, bumptious classmates, wondering if he should leave after all. And he couldn’t shake the embarrassment he’d faced, being held up by the warden like that.
     The moon hung long and low above them as they darted over the crests of dunes, skipping over snake holes en route for what Orson hoped would be an experience as titillating as the Big Man had promised.
     They made their way deeper, into the engulfing blackness of the desert, the ranger mumbling indistinctly to himself in a singsongy pulse, using words Orson couldn’t quite hear over the roar of the dry winds buffeting his eardrums, hardening his joints with their harsh chill. Their trek drew into an enduring blur of unabating, cruelly sloped drifts. They measured their slow progress by the point of the moon in the sky, though it wasn’t moving much.
     Orson’s legs ached and his lips had long chapped over, but he pressed on, following closely in tow of the warden’s winking shadow, mirroring the pathway the giant carved and rejoicing at the occasions when his leader’s back provided him with a momentary shield against the wind, against the flecks of sand filling in the creases of his eyelids and the flaps of his ears.
     Face my ownmost self, Orson thought. Yeah, right. If we ever get out of this mess.
     The wind picked up, beating more violently against his naked cheeks, chaffing them into two rosy mounds as arid and swollen as the environs through which they traversed. This was the closest thing to a sandstorm he’d ever seen. The spineless extremities of those harsh currents whipped into Orson like a cat-o-nine-tails, cutting through his skin like butter. But just when he was ready to give up, to call it quits, to tell the warden to pick him up like a helpless infant and head back toward the banal, unremarkable world—just before saying, “Um, excuse me, but I think I made a mistake in coming here, might we please go back?”—the warden mumbled some words Orson finally did comprehend, and they were welcome words, soothing as watermelon juice is to a fiercely burning hangover.
     The warden said, “We’re almost there. It’s just past the next crest. Look out for the shape of the monument.”
     “Okay,” Orson said. He tried to check on the camera peeking oh-so-subtly from under the front flap of his backpack, to confirm that its little eye was still squinting imperceptibly from behind a carefully punched-in silver grommet—recording their every move—but the warden kept turning toward him, his big hands urging them forward.
     Orson was almost certain he’d powered it up when he parked the beat-up rental. He could remember the feel of the little plastic ridges on the side of the power switch, the feeling of his thumb sliding against it as it made a soundless shift to the right, toward the position labeled ON.
     But he wasn’t sure—just almost certain.
     Ahead of Orson, the warden was mumbling again.
     The moment was close—just around the corner, he said, so close at hand, one drift of sand away.
     At last, it rose over the next dune like a golem’s stony hand—its fingers separated and protruding from the pebbly ground. The monument swelled before them; it was made up of giant and sturdy, forbidding pillars connected together by moss-covered cactus arms, like some deity’s barren canopy. It was an outcropping that evoked all the wonder of Stonehenge, but with an unequivocally violent undertone, as though whoever or whatever created the structure had been born with a seething madness which was so visible, so palpable in the form of the stones.
     “There it is,” the Big Man said. “There’s the monument.”
     “I see it,” Orson said, but almost wished he hadn’t.