the solfugid

The sky was as crimson peering across at what was at once receding light and...

Emerging darkness.

As sky must e'er be at the precipice between day and night...

Night and day...

It was...

Intoxicating.

Out there...

beyond the gates...

there were arcane sounds of terrified people or creatures seeking shelter...

from pervasive tumult...

A bilious hissing or rasping sound lingered like wailing on the wary wind...

Beyond the wadi... 

and the berm...

As ever...

I was awake at the gates...

The dream still beating in my heart but...

Weighing..,

Upon my thoughts.

The mandatory waypoint imposed at the border crossing was overrun with military contingents moving north...

Or south...

As well as countless forcibly displaced and existentially disrupted people...

Refugees...

As we like to refer to...

Them.

Vigilant guards patrolled the perimeter in pairs with their menacing dogs, but somehow paid no attention to the random soldiers who made their way to the gates to permit desperate refugee women...

fallen on their knees...

to gag on their putrescence long enough to earn some coin or...

some actual sustenance.

There was a ghastly wail on the winds in the...

distance.

I had been out in the desert for three straight days...

And nights.

When I came unto the waypoint, I was no longer sure why I had come or whether I had any capacity to deal with the chaos that pervaded the place, as I had come to...

Know...

Some semblance of my own...

Capacity for...

Tolerance.

Over the course of those previous...

Three...

Days and nights...

I was burning...

and freezing...

In truth, the entire passage of time was some absurd insult rendered amid the flow of the warring to which everyone I knew then had become all too accustomed...

too numb.

For three days I had been...

Waiting for the dignitary I was supposed to meet, and then bring...

North...

Or South...

It just depended on the status of his or her's ongoing or emerging...

Requirement.

But those three days had already passed.

And there I was...

In the desert...

Losing my patience...

My mind...

Waiting.

And he not yet having manifested at the predetermined grid coordinates...

I was confounded...

And frustrated.

I did not have any control over the times or the places that were imposed upon me.

I did not have...

Any...

Control.

I was told that he would only arrive at night...

It was said that he conducted his affairs only within the frames of a nocturne.

Couriered in like some soft simplex into the epidermis...

It was simply so.

And in this instance, I was meant to be the courier.

"Wonderful," I thought, as I tried to stretch my long frame across the backseat of the Jeep Cherokee I had been issued for the completion of this...

task.

I fell asleep for a spell and when I awoke the wailing sound that I had heard before was omnipresent.

It was like some cacophonous plea against the fabric of what what was...

What had come to be in that...

war.

Seasons are seasons...

But when the sun fades away in the desert, it is wicked cold.

Wicked...

cold.

The numbly rendered, but informative computer training modules that were imposed upon me prior to...

deployment...

resonated at once for the simple linear association of what I was experiencing.

Those vacant computer faces and voices spoke of "camel spiders, sun spiders, wind spiders or... wind scorpions," and the way that these creatures aggressively preserved the perceived territorial state, albeit without any venom.

The word that I was compelled to remember was "Solfugid"

"It's not technically a spider, but it is an arachnid... it's just a Solfugid," Gottard had said.

He was the French Liaison Officer who had been assigned to prepare and support me over the duration of my mission in that desert war zone.

"Mostly, they are nocturnal, extremely territorial and top predators in arid ecosystems: They eat other predators in the same size range as them, or a bit larger, even small birds. Camel spiders eat each other, too.

They don't have venom like spiders — it's unnecessary, thanks to their powerful jaws. They also use the secretions of their digestive fluids to soften the flesh of their prey and consume them...

Does that make sense?"

"Yes," I had said, sipping warm water from a bladder, prior to my departure unto the desert's centre.