Edge of the world, edge of Western civilization, edge of the desert, of birth, of death, edge of a sky falling over us at the speed of a year’s last breath. The sky falls over a sea of campers, trailers, diaspora from the north, over an acid-green lightshow to rival the Fourth; banking and turning like a gull on wing, the sky dips its beak into a cold salt sea awaiting the spring; flies off to circle the cross planted at the summit of a mountain made to remember, trembling ecstatically with the narcotic old age that dies with December. The sky falls like a prayer over cows awaiting their slaughter; over shotgun-toting drunks chasing boys from their daughters; over hairy-legged spiders, scavenging buzzards, snakes and quail and fleet-footed lizards; over steampunks dressed in goggles and buckles; over mispelled tattoos stitched across knuckles; over hastily built shelters and lean-tos and fires; hitchhikers; storytellers; raconteurs and natural-born liars; repurposed vehicles; restarted lives; reborn bachelors missing their wives; travelers stopping at the hot springs for a rest, worries lost in the steam rising from flower children’s breasts; a makeshift stage swelling with banjo, guitar, violin, accordion, washboard, saw, a triangle’s chime; a convoy of jaded adventurers seeking a place out of time; fevered art ejaculating fevered dreams; the ghost-turned-god in the machine; the nostalgic bard come to see off the year; the anxious exile pregnant with fear; the experienced; the snowbird; the newcomer; the naïve; the once-devout soul wanting to believe; radioactive sand; pet cemetery; spine-stuck fruits; Homo urbanus discovering its roots; Cinnabar Charm; an ocean of lights; a strobe above the tower strafing the night; solar-powered constellations and earthbound stars; bicycle pornographers; burned-out whores; gypsies; train-hoppers; the merely curious; the one-track hack journalists chronicling the spurious; the sky falls over temerarious footprints — lifespans measured in exhalations of sand and wind — and crashes somewhere in the mountains to explode the funeral pyres of things gone and things left behind. We are all of us the inevitable consequence of every year that came before this. And whether or not there was something in the water, freighted in that one maddened midnight second of light and noise and joy and love with all the world’s mortality, the desert creatures danced as if there should have been.