skonen_blades

This was my fourth summer paving the flat parts of Nevada with solar panels. Up in Canada during my teens, I’d been a treeplanter and this wasn’t much different. The project had been going on for four years and looked like it would go on for another six.

Petra still liked me, I thought, but she was with Johan now. I could understand. I hadn’t been that good to her and now I’d lost her. I’d tried to be what she wanted but my natural jerk tendencies just took hold of me whenever I got angry. My head was too filled up with ‘being a man’ after a childhood of punishments every time I was gentle or weak. We’d split up the summer before.

Just dumb luck that she ended up on my panel crew with Johan. They didn’t break up the couples. Single panel layers like me could be slotted anywhere.

I noticed the glint of a diamond on her finger. Must have cost Johan everything he had.

A summer under the cruel desert sun will teach you about yourself. The sun teaches you your limits and it teaches you the elastic nature of time.

The solar panels were printed off and cut into lightweight, paper-thin wafers before being loaded into heavy groups of four hundred panels each. These panel-blocks slotted nicely into our backpacks.

To lay the panels, we reached back in a motion as old as archery to grab a panel, flopped it down onto the dusty ground and latched two of the corners to the panels already laid. We dusted the leads, sprayed the protectant and walked two steps backward to do the next one.

Sometimes, people walking backwards would walk right into a canyon. One had to concentrate.

We put the black thermal side down and the shiny blue solar side facing up.

It was a mechanical and quick motion that needed to be done in a relaxed manner at a steady pace without being straining. New guys came in and raced ahead only to burn out with tennis elbow or RSI halfway through the season.

People asked why this process isn’t automated but the answer was obvious. It was always cheaper to employ meat to do this kind of work. You didn’t have to repair a human. You just hired a new one.

A few Workers Board lawsuits had resulted in the relative guarantee of job safety but you needed to pay attention. Water rations, sunscreen, night tents, proper gear and clothing, everything was yours and needed to be looked after.

I kept thinking of the Fremen from that Dune book and Arabs dressed in pristine white robes on camels. I thought about the Egyptians and their total capitulation to Ra, the sun god.

I felt like I could teach them all a thing or two about desert living by now.

Petra pretended I wasn’t there after an initial smile on the truck and that suited me fine. No use getting into a conversation that only had one possible awkward ending when there was work to be done. The truck stopped after an hour and we all got out.

I marched forward up the dusty walkway with the crew until the edge of where the other team had stopped before us. The irregular border spread out in a jagged line for miles on either side of us. Half of us went single-file to the east and half of us went single-file to the west. All across Nevada, hundreds of other teams were doing the same.

From orbit, the tiles were bright, sky-coloured, shining, square kilometers with thin sandy walkways in between. We were turning the desert into a grid; an energy-producing azure powder-blue plaid. Vegas and Reno truly looked like unreal cities sprouting from fields of shining sapphire glass.

America’s desert was becoming the colour of a tropical ocean. Baby-blue batteries. Powder-blue powerhouses.

This was America in action. The earth was done giving up her oil. The Wind and Sun Speech given by Clinton Jr. was famous. America would be great again and serve as an example to the rest of world like the days of the space race in the sixties, she said. We would be back on top and prove that energy could still be taken from places that wouldn’t harm the environment, she said.

And goddamned if she wasn’t right. We didn’t have the bodies for the bicycle farms of China. We’d dammed up all of the rivers that we could. The wind farms and geothermal drills were giving us a good deal of energy but still not enough to compete.

Our entire country was batteries not included. Paving Nevada with solar panels was going to recharge the entire country’s economy. Regular repair and upkeep would keep almost five percent of the entire continent’s population employed.

Panel People. Redbacks. Sunkids. Desert Rats. There were many names for us, depending on where you came from.

Petra and I were the only two people from the town where we grew up.

Petra went west with her man. With a sigh of relief and a little sadness, I went East. It would be two weeks before the supply trucks ran out and we had to return to base for more water, food and the next printout of panels, before we had to see each other again.

The sun screamed down at all of us. We were ants on the hot ground. I looked up through reflective lenses and smiled at the sun’s punishment, daring it to do its worst.

I walked to my grid point designation, reached back over my shoulder for a panel, and got to work.




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His car ran out of gas. It puttered to a stop on the side of a hot highway in Road Runner country. The desert stretched out around him for eternity. The sun was nearing the horizon. He remembered that photographers referred to this as the ‘magic hour’.

Dust settled around his car. The sudden silence was marred only by the ticking of the car’s engine cooling and his own breathing.

It was an old car. Brown paint and rusted in the wheel wells. It settled with a sigh like it was ready for sleep. It rested like it would be grateful to be left there to decay into more basic components over the decades. It stopped like it was ready to die and had picked this spot to slip loose from earthly bondage.

The driver stepped out and adjusted his old sweat-stained cowboy hat. His sunglasses glinted in the light over his thick red moustache. His red shirt was dirty and stained with grease like his fingertips. He licked his lips and looked around.

He sat on the hood of his car and looked at the sun make its way towards a kiss with the horizon. The sunset would rip open the world in pinks and violets before fading to black.

The driver could almost hear some lonesome slide guitar haunting the landscape. The only sound now was the wind carrying secrets.

He knew from this far outside of a city that he’d be able to see millions more stars that he’d seen in a long, long time. He might even be able to see the river of the Milky Way itself cutting the universe in half up there in the night sky.

It got cold at night here in the desert but he had blankets in the trunk.

He didn’t know how long it would be before he got picked up by a passing motorist but he was hoping it would be a while.

He crossed his ankles and looked up into the sky.



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I’m crawling through the desert.

They shot me in the belly. They cut me up a little as well. Like one of my eyes and a few fingers. Nothing major, you understand? I mean nothing major in terms of immediate blood loss. They wanted me to suffer. They carved a few funny things into my back in simple letters like I was a tree near a high school. They cut my Achilles tendons as well.

They did this at noon and drove away. It’s six o’clock now. I’m starting to wonder if I’m immortal and this will become some sort of eternal punishment. Time has taken on a new meaning for me. Every minute is an hour.

It’s not like I didn’t have it coming. I mean, two hundred thousand is a lot of money. I just hope Rosie was smart enough to skip town. She probably wasn’t. I didn’t marry her for her brains. Chances are they’ll find some sun bleached skeleton a few hundred yards west of here with huge boobs and big lips that even the scavengers have sense enough not to touch. Maybe they’ll do something funny like position our corpses like we’re screwing or something.

These people I ran with are bad people. I knew that. I’m no angel but I couldn’t do what they did to me. I had it coming, though. And no use crying over spilt blood.

Lazy buzzards with all the time in the world are circling.

I crawled maybe fifteen feet before laughing myself into paralysis and bleeding a bunch more. I’m just lying still now. Cooking. But it’s starting to cool off. It’s getting dark. And cold. It gets real cold in the desert at night.

I saw the first one about fifteen minutes after I died.

I was sitting cross legged beside the ruin of my mortal shell in the darkness. My spirit was embarassingly naked but more healthy than I’d been in years. Or maybe as healthy as I would have been without the drugs and the drinking and the cigarettes and whatever else.

She poked her head up over the sand dune closest to me for half a second. I would have missed it except her eyes were lit up by the moon like a couple of green streetlights. A few more heads popped up as well.

They tentatively came up over the dunes and towards me. I watched in utter amazement.

They were women and no doubt about it, but tiny and with the heads of foxes. Well not really just the head. I mean, their legs were bent all long-shins like a dog and they seemed to have long fingered paws rather than hands. They had a line of fur down the middle of their backs and huge fox tails. Their torsos were definitely human female but emaciated and athletic at the same time.

They were grace personified.

They were soul scavengers. I had been claimed.

The desert gets to keep what dies there. An agreement with the Upstairs and the Basement had long ago been reached.

Feral desert fairies that no one had ever heard about because no one alive had ever seen them.

Desert Foxes.

No use running.



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