Dunes, 1.D.2, 300 words
He shuffles out toward stark mountain silhouettes wandering in folded creases. The moon is high over the valley, at its brightest. He sits on his stone armchair. The merestone is not aligned with the high dune. Footprints surround its pedestal and lead back up to the road. A hard windstorm drags sand down the valley and over still things longing for burial. A glow rises over the horizon. As if the changing landscape were a television facing the wall, a bed upended, a coded array of chairs at a table, those rebuses of struggle that he never found at the beginning of tales, only the abandoned ends, he gets up frequently to reconstruct the armchair into alignment upwind from the dune peak. The hypnosis of repetition, of finding the same irreducible totalities with their miraculous origins is the march of senselessness. It is a sleep of incorruptible and ceaseless patterns of light. His waxy hair blows. After relocating through several stations further up from the crest he is parked so oblique to it that it no longer seems to move. In relation to the merestone now the dunes begin to edge over a brink into the glow. Though with nothing but emptiness unchanging in this whole stretch to scale its impact, the soft warmth of the aurora is almost that of a small town hung beneath the sand. The coming sunrise will be his eighth day stalled out at this motel. A low groan or snore rumbles from a starry spire of sand straight out from him that rolls down ahead of itself. Behind it another rises. Up and over the rock field slowly toward the breaching light of the motel he methodically pecks. The night manager is dissected by blinds. The dunes run down flat in the failing moonlight.