Pastel flash sheet of skulls, eyes and palm trees

The sheet was my work, done in gouache and fineliner over three winters in the back room above the launderette. Every design on it was a promise. The horned skull was for Dez, who had buried a horse and wanted flowers growing out of the bone. The crab was for Ruth, because she was born under it and had never once gone sideways. Hard to beat, I'd written beside the moon wheel, and yes beside the eye that never closed. At the motel desk the clerk asked if the drawings were for sale. I told him everything on that page had already been spoken for.

Out past the last pump a storm was building over the dry lake, the little blue cloud I'd drawn suddenly enormous, its raindrops falling in long streaks that never reached the sand. I pulled over and got out. The air smelled of cut sage and hot tin. I stood with the door open and waited, and when the rain finally came it was only three fat drops on the windscreen, pale blue, exactly like the ones on the paper.

Ruth rang at dawn to ask if I'd kept the seahorse upright. I said I had. Then she asked whether the eye was still watching, and I looked at the sheet, at the orange lightning I'd added as an afterthought, and found I didn't have an answer. I wiped the three drops away with my sleeve and wrote yes on the glass in soap, and let the desert read it however it liked.