Then you proceeded on foot

Then you proceeded on foot and the scenes passed slower, painfully immersive after the rush past of the whole basin in an airless wind through the cracked car window. From far out in the sterile dunes John’s car glittered, the only defect along the shoulder, and you watched him from atop the crest of a dune as he walked from the edge of where the sand gave way back to the alluvial gravel of the valley floor toward his car along the rumble strip of the road. You measured the shadows of scrub and other dunes against the landmarks of debris or idiosyncratic wind prints to mark the time as the sun set. It dangled across the axis of the valley, still high enough to burn white, and reflected off of the dunes’ sand floor and washed back into the air as radiation that tightened your exposed skin noticeably.
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