If you drive the Maricopa Freeway through the scrub south of Tempe, and you stop just where the mountains begin to flicker on the horizon to the west, and you get out of the car and walk towards them for an hour, you might find me.

Please don't.

Please don't, Mary.

The sand is so hot it burns through your shoes. The cow-high wire fence just off the road isn't much of a barrier, but still, you might strain something climbing over it. Or it might have barbs to tear your flowing skirt—I can't seem to remember. But you would bring clippers, and cut your way through, either way, wouldn't you, Mary?

Then further in you go, or further out, as you might still be thinking. Brush that looks burned crackles as you fight through it, or leers at you once you learn better than to try. You are covered with little nicks and scratches. You can smell your own blood as it seeps out of them—a rich, appetizing scent that rises above the hot, piercing odor of the sand, that cuts through the must and sage.

You press on. Further in.

Turn around. Please?

So many stop, so many of the twinned and single lights that course by us in the night. Some stop for a while, and then move on. Some stop and stay, and later we go out to collect them. The ones we choose.

Or it could be, it could be, that it is not us, but the road herself, who chooses. Who pops a tire or turns a gaze or lulls a tired mind to sleep. Those lucky few she deems worthy. Or those unlucky. What does she wish, to cull the herd of the weak, or to pluck away the best, the cherries atop the cream?

I know what I hope. I hope it is the weak, Mary, because then you will be safe.

Very few stop in the day—though it is safer? Because it is safer. And so it is terribly easy to recognize the blue wedge of your hybrid, resting there on the shoulder, door hanging open.

Please, Mary, don't. We don't want you. I don't.

You've found the egg, now, though you don't yet know to call it that. You've pushed through the desert, and the mountains loom close. You've thrown away the water you brought—a camel-back, probably, to leave your hands free—because it has grown too thin to quench your thirst. You feel yourself drying in the sun, baking like a mug in a kiln. What made you weak and pliable burns away and leaves a new thing, hard and strong and brittle and sharp.

You don't know to call it an egg because it doesn't look like one. It doesn't look like anything, really. One more mound of sallow dirt topped by one more musty creosote bush. Even so, you stop. You scuff at the dirt with a toe of a boot that smells of fresh leather, you pace around the egg. Once, twice, three times, pondering. Drawn in, not knowing why or where in may be found.

I wonder.

Here is what you do, Mary: get down on your knees. Adopt an attitude of prayer. Of Thanksgiving. Dig your manicure into the ground. Break a pink nail. Break two. Scrape and scrabble until one shredded fingertip touches something that is not sand or gravel or anything of Earth at all. Sweep, sweep frantically now, uncover all that you can.

You want to call the color bronze, but it isn't. It isn't any kind of color you can see, not yet. You want to draw pictures on it with your blood, but you resist. You don't understand the urge. It is just weird enough to make you wonder, to make you come close to standing up and turning away.

This is the door. Not what you have uncovered, but the moment. The moment when the last stitch of your humanity unravels and you step out of your skin and paint in blood on the ancient shell of the egg of midnight words that you cannot possibly know, words that were old when we drank the green ichor of Cambrian brachiopods, words that open the future and close the past, forever, forever, and forever. Heart words. Blood words. Hunter's words.

Or it doesn't, and you don't.

But you—you do. You will. I think you will. Will you, Mary, my Mary, o Mary of mine, whose scent I smell, whose face I see, framed in curls and eclipsing the sun, and peering down at me?

Did I say I do not want you, Mary, o Mary, o Mary of mine? I lied. Tonight we hunt, o Mary, and I lied, I lied, I lied.