myself what had happened, the sky wasn’t the same baby-blue indigo it was like yesterday. The
sky was all black, and grey, like a thunderstorm was about to erupt like a volcano spitting out
ash and lava. I realized the sky was a hazed black, the grey was smog, spreading across the sky.
Touching the white cotton candy like clouds, killing them, like blue ink droplets being dropped
into a cup of water.
I stood at the sky enthralled and in shock with a face that was cartoonish, it looked like a
perfect copy of those men on those old cartoons, jaw on the floor and human bug eyes. I think I
was as still as a statue for a few hours, but it was actually only about twenty minutes. I stopped
thinking, I blacked out, then it all came back to me. I had to be as silent as I could be, light headed
and feeling the moist water I drank in the bush coming from my stomach to my throat, the taste of
blood. I felt sick, but knowing that once you coughed up the blood and the moist, juicy leaves and
was out, there’s no stop to the slow painful death. I remembered that now my life was going to end.
I started to walk and then I was trotting like a horse that was warming up for its racing game,
I started to run. Feeling my legs move like the hind legs of a horses, strong steady and powerful,
but the pain in my neck was growing and I thought that if I was going to stop galloping in the
wind, feeling safer the pain would go away.
Then the sky was black and a few splotches of navy blue started showering water from the
amazing camouflage of the clouds, then within a few seconds it was a downpour, the sand going
wet and the once dry land with patches of sand that had been dug out to make holes were filled
up with water almost immediately. I opened my mouth and then let my tongue out, the rain
droplets cooling my throat once I swallowed. It was the first time in centuries that the Gobi
desert thundered and poured rain on the land like somebody pouring water out of a full bucket
repeatedly. The sand dunes, destroyed, the floor over flowing with water and the small cracks on
the rocks, flooded, and those rocks had enormous cracks. The cracks large enough to fit two of
me in them, the bushes were fertile and green, vegetation was all alive. I was relieved that it was
raining but then terrified, I ran for my life.
Faster than ever before I ran, but the only problem was that the sand was heavy, water
splashing around and blinding me and no sense of direction, leading me to believe that I was
lost and weak. Going to the nearest bush I could find, I picked up a leaf, got my hairpiece that
was fairly small, and put it in the leaf. I put the compass on the water, and hands over the leaf
so the rain won’t flood the leaf and sink it into the water. I knew that west- east was my only
option so I saw the needle, ran to the left once I had picked my metal hairpiece, stuck it back in
place, and half ran and swam the fastest in mankind’s history. The desert was now lush green and
underwater, but I still swam.
The desert looked beautiful in the water, but my top priority was to live, the thought of the
whole desert going underwater, becoming an ocean, petrified me. I swam crying and pleading for
the desert not to change, to stay dry and hot. But now it’s humid, water and blazing with heat.
It’s been five hundred years since the desert flooded with water, and all those days since I left the
desert, for safety and hunger and thirst, have been a relief.
