By Jameson Grey
Lee crested the dune. He’d come to find Alex and gotten lost himself.
Below, a platoon had set up bivouac and was relaxing. “I must be hallucinating!” Lee thought. There were no soldiers out here anymore – all long since redeployed or sent home.
“This desert eats you alive,” Alex had complained, aeons ago now.
Overhead, a falcon glided with menace.
Lee remembered something else Alex had said during their last call: “We’re all just ghosts waiting to happen, Dad.”
Since then, it had been days – weeks even – of searching, and his boots were, like him, worn thin with effort in such arid reckoning. Lee stumbled down the slip face. The sand burned his hands as he slid, but he was smiling. At the foot of the dune, his daughter Alex, among the troops of her purgatory mirage, was waiting there to welcome him, while beyond lay the eternal desert.
Jameson Grey is originally from England but now lives with his family in western Canada. His work has been published by Ghost Orchid Press, Black Ink Fiction and Hellbound Books as well as in Trembling with Fear, Dark Moments and Dark Dispatch. He can be found at jameson-grey.com and occasionally on Twitter @thejamesongrey.
The Birdseed 