Salt Flats at Low Light

The basin holds the sky like a bowl left on a table after everyone has gone— still, full of a color that has no name, the brine crust breathing its slow mineral breath.

A heron stands at the edge of reflection, one leg lifted as though it reconsidered the water, then forgot what it was reconsidering. The shadow it casts is longer than the bird.

We drove here because the map showed nothing. You said: look how far the eye can go before it meets something it cannot cross. The mountains agreed, small and permanent.

The sun drops behind a ridge and the flats go pewter, then lead, then dark— not like sleep but like a sentence that ends before you expected the period.

We don't speak on the way back. The headlights pick out gravel, then asphalt, then the town with its one lit window telling nothing, telling everything.