He stands among the towering saguaros with summer hands and a cactus face. A steady thing, he is. Sunburnt. Silent. Only widening his jaws once per year when a desert flower needs to bloom under the oracular rains. Precipitation that is as infrequent as his words. He is quiet on most days. The keywords being most, days. What a curiosity it would be to have silence, to have my mouth wired shut, like my mother’s after her carwreck. Eighteen stitches, she said. A face full of broken glass, she said. No one wants to speak when it causes flesh and glass to meet and grind. Discomfort is such an inhibiting thing, stronger than any prescription drug a faux-pharmacist could peddle on a windswept street corner. And sure enough—there he is, growing within the gridline cracks of adobe bricks beneath the lamplight. Dusty, but persistent. Persistent to the point of inescapability. So too is this concept—this idea—of becoming Cactus Face inescapable. I sometimes wonder if my mother’s carwreck was inescapable, a force of fate. Perhaps she was destined to have her face peeled back from the fissure-riddled windshield. Destined to learn the virtues of a silent daughter—of a silent sister. And what if that was all she had known—silence, and waiting? All these answerless questions, and she still feels the ramifications today, with her metal-molded jaw—forced open, gaping. She chokes on the weeds bursting from her throat. Coughing up seeds and spores. I do not wish to be as such. A thousand waxy sprouts are far less inspiring than a single one—for rarity is beauty, even if it is plain.

She is the source of your pulse found outside of your skin. She is the perfect eye of a hurricane with a maelstrom all around it. Internal hormonal warfare leaves you breathless, electric, hopeless, in turns. You lay awake, your heart pounding, your mind's eye manifesting Her - your brain has spent so long seeing Her and wanting Her that it has made you a handy backup hologram. Neat.