She looked up at the sky and laughed. Laughing, laughing, laughing, and then growling. Growling, growling, growling, and then screaming. Screaming, screaming, screaming, and then weeping. No more tears. The hunger won’t wait. Running. Running, running, running; faster than the sun. The sun orbiting this place at the same rate that it takes a mayfly to die on other planets (thirty minutes). Time is a useless concept here. Shadows dancing in circles, mocking stagnation. She must always move if she doesn’t want her shadow to catch her. No place to escape the shadows. No hole in the rocks. No rocks.
Just orange grass licking her legs. She collapsed into it. Sleep again. The shadow of her sleeping body circuiting her twice. She awakens and nurses the babe whom she carries wrapped and tied to her back.
Now, barely enough time to find red berries in the grass. She knows this; ignorant of other possibilities existing. Here, sleep is the timekeeper. Everything revolves around that master.

She woke up. More running. In the distance was the horrifying place she thought she had escaped. Hopelessness sets in.

“The vultures eat our babies here.” Her voice underneath glowing orbs curtained by blood clotted hair.
Tarantula-like arms cling to the babe; alien veins transplanted externally to the infant’s not yet diseased skin, encircling and pulsing with dangerous and ugly rhythm. Somewhere in the stagnant air are scented boulders of burning flesh; sacrifices to a starving landscape that is apathetic to the tortures inflicted upon her inhabitants that were not her daughters or sons anyway.

“Give the baby to me,” I mouthed to this beautifully narcoleptic creature.  It didn’t matter if she refused, as she would soon be dying that revolving dark death that consumed most of her time.  They were all narcoleps here.  A sort of visceral adaptation perhaps.  There was no purpose in being awake here.  She tilted her head back and forth in futile refusal.

Bitter drops of dust had not yet frozen on the tips of the cactus-like vegetation.  I waited.  Her dusty tears carved her grimy face into an asymmetrical pattern.  Five more drops of her encapsulated stoic hatred of me until her untimely collapse. Her deciduous body crumpled painlessly-habitually into suspended animation of a fetal position.  Stasis hacked her into guts of silence and surrender.  The infant rolled out of her betraying limbs into my prepared arms.

She was almost right. Sometimes the vultures do eat the babies here; when the mothers fall into their unfortunate slumbers. I looked up into the burning yellow sky. Already, giant shadows of death circling her; a habit. Sometimes they are disappointed, though; like now.

I start running in the direction she had come. Away from the mocking village of death. I know that I can make it. I chew guarana berries to stay awake, as a preventative for the narcolepsy that has not yet taken me.