THE DRY SPELL: Prologue

ELENA

           I know he is here.

My senses are heightened with the silence of the desert, my ears pricking up like a fawn stalked in the forest. I can hear his labored breathing, heavy from decades of Cuban cigar smoke. I can smell his repulsive cologne, hanging so thick in the air it chokes me and makes me want to cough, but I must remain as still as an elf owl. 

The hunter is here, in my home. My husband is here. 

I have managed to lock myself in a suffocating compartment beneath my house, and as I hear his Italian leather shoes crushing the gravel above me, I recall the childhood story of the three little pigs. The big bad wolf has come to blow my house down, and he has come wearing his usual disguise. 

The analogy of the wolf does not quite fit, however. He is not a lone wolf, but more like a leader of a pack of hyenas. One would think someone as quiet as a mouse and delicate as a bluebird would pose no threat to him, but still he has come. He has come to take my life. I have nowhere to run in a landscape of mica and dust, so I must hide, shutting my eyes so tightly so that maybe I can disappear. 

            He crashes through the house like a hurricane, destroying everything in his path. My garden is demolished. My handmade clothes are torn to shreds. My kitchen where I prepare thousands of raw, vegan meals to malnourished children and the impoverished inhabitants of Skid Row, my living room where I have gathered meetings of friends and supporters of The No Impact movement, my bedroom where I have prayed for enlightenment, guidance, and (most importantly) safety and freedom from my husband, the CEO of the most powerful computer company in the world; all of these sacred places in my home are devoured by the Man with the Insatiable Hunger. 

            In the darkness of my hiding place I am smiling. He cannot take away from me what I have acquired because the wealth cannot be measured by any physical currency. I am smiling with the knowledge that the world is ending, and therefore none of the things we used to own/He owns/I had/He destroyed will remain when it is over. 

I am smiling because, though he may be the richest man in the world, I am the most powerful woman. He knows this, though the declaration has never passed through my lips. I am smiling because the man who has always preferred sleeping with other women is now jealous of me. 

I am smiling because he will never catch me.