Nevadan Sky
by Walter Garcia
08/04/2009

The breeze was surprisingly chilly when Vanessa stepped out of the brown, beat up minivan, and stretched her legs out on the sandy road. It must have been almost night fall now; the giant red sun had finally set over the flat plateaus the far distance, giving the Nevadan sky a beautiful array of colors, including oranges reds and purples, amongst already being dotted with silver stars that could only be seen the the desert skies.

She had been driving for days now, today managing to make it 10 hours closer to her home in California. She walked out onto the sand off the side of her parked van; her dark brown eyes taking in the scenery for a minute and enjoying the sheer silence of the desert. There wasn't a noisy business man yelling on his cellphone, or an angry cab driver yelling at traffic for miles and miles from here.

She bent down to examine the red sand at her feet and grabbed a handful of it, letting it run through her bronzed fingers, tanned over the last few days of being on the hot and sunny road. There wasn't a single thought that ran through her usually busy mind, glad to be free from the choke hold of the city life, for once. Vanessa stood up and dusted her hands on her denim shorts and light blue tank top, although she still was enjoying the feeling of the red sand still sifting between her flat green flip flops and her toes.

Sighing, with slight disappointment to depart from her brief bonding with nature, she walked back to her brown, beat up minivan. She prayed that she never have the horrible luck of ending up in the middle of nowhere again and have to wait for hours more for a tow truck to find her and her useless brown minivan.

The moon was now fully visible against the now cold desert sky, and the breeze was just a little colder than it had been just moments before. Vanessa sat in the back seat of her minivan, unable to roll up the electric windows to her dead vehicle. She rubbed her bare arms with her bronzed fingers in the coming desert night, and waited.