Nose was single
Nose was single brown hole sifting down to black in the depths of the head in a funnel sort of a cascade right down from leathery mummified gums and enormous wind-bleached and moonlit teeth lacking saliva that glitters for the living. This trustworthy face couldn’t cast shadows on itself. But as sand creeps it crept in tangential wavelets with leading edges like the hems of sheets being drawn across the sand and the face and feet begin to disappear in tomographic phases. Each wave was preceded by the telegraph of a shallow crunch through the mantle of the dune. The plods were far enough apart as to divide the rhythm into the dives of isolated desert creatures into the sand as the rising moon stole the cover of their night shadow, each separate and forgotten in a distinct world whose only cosmology is the distant memory of the last crunching sound which may or may not have been the fore-echo of a single escape. Each sang more perfectly the shape than the last, more imminent until they ceased altogether as much as an interrupted sequence can fool the reverberant surfaces to forget it. The moon at its apogee rang over the dunes without shadow, without error, trustworthy. The face and feet are gone. Only in the acceptance that flaws, even sunken, are enduring, and although in the flash of the believable homogeneity the body, or the feet and face, are now questionable, a hopeless breath-high sand geyser puffed and built a shallow crater above the repressed nose hole.