Fingernails

In the desert we slept between two blankets that smelled like turmeric and were the color of turmeric. Sometime later I woke up cold. Our guides were still sprawled around the fire, passing a joint and singing Bollywood songs in warbly falsetto. Then I dreamed I was lost in a field of sheep, so many sheep that you couldn’t see the field. In the morning the sand shifted like a kalaediscope: there were beetles everywhere, skittering like spilled coffee beans. I forced myself to touch one on its hard brown wings. It felt like my fingernails, those small armored places.