Yr Dead

by Sam Sax

Aarom and I bunk together, and some nights he lets me sleep in his bed so I can cuddle up next to him when it gets cold, which it does often in the desert. I don’t really understand why we’re here. Sure, it’s a beautiful country, I think, looking out over someone else’s desert—can someone even own a desert and, if so, how could it possibly be us?—so different from the astringent skyscrapers and fried drive-through windows I come from. It’s clear, being here, that neither here nor back home, with its strip-malls and what the strip-malls cover up, is my home. If anything, my home is the endless empty parking lot fields growing crops of trash and plastic tumble weed. My home is where my body breathes and nowhere else, where it’s going and where it’s been. Can someone just say a thing is theirs and it becomes so? Can you really go back to the neighborhood your great-great-great grandparents might have lived in and say, This is my house? Not caring who lives there? Years later, Aarom will return to this beautiful country and say just that. He will meet his wife, make a child, and learn to fire a gun.