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…Six Months Before Bulgaria...

  “How do you want it be?” He asked.

  “Like this, with me alone.” She had said.

  …The Desert...

  The wind picked up and blew the sand into Bettina’s back; it pushed her forward. The tops of the dunes where a golden hue with crested black bowls, but the bottom stayed a tawny color that was slowly covering Bettina’s boots. The girl’s tiny silhouette danced over the dunes up ahead. She skipped this way and that taunting Bettina. Bettina kept walking, because there was nothing left to do. The girl’s dancing figure stopped and Bettina ran, she ran toward the girl in an attempt to catch up, but a great cloud of dust hit her in the face and she was blinded. The sand found its way into her ears, eyes and every fold of her clothes. She fell to the ground face first. She rolled over and looked up. There was the little imp, above her, smiling the half-smile with gaps and jagged teeth, her black-blue eyes like bruises but framed by the purest white. The girl buried her charwoman hands in the sand then lifted them out while Bettina opened her mouth; the sand fell into Bettina. It scratched the inside of her throat and she coughed. But she relaxed and accepted it, swallowing mouthfuls submissively, the last grain in the hourglass and all she could think, “it’s warm.”

  SPAIN/EVENING OF SANT JOAN