Somewhere It Led to Something Else by Dan Pinkerton She absorbs these cacti, these needles. Even the palm fronds she takes into her body, folding them up and holding them inside. Metabolising them. Coffee and toast in Barstow diners. Gingkoes hedging in sagebrush. She welcomes these things to herself. They brown her skin, smoothing it, burning it. Burnishing it. Turning her flesh to bronze, to alloys even tougher, more difficult to crack. She remembers a book she read as a kid, two brothers caught in the desert. They waited for condensation to gather in a hubcap. She always wanted to try that: just tip the rim and guzzle. Feel that hot aluminum on her lips. And now she’s stuck with some guy, a manic-depressive who lays by the pool all day. At night there’s a glow: a vaporous dash, the trailing tail of a hyphen. She thinks: this water is meant to bandage the desert. She thinks: maybe some bone inside me is finally breaking loose. Back when she was a kid, on Halloween, she rode her boyfriend’s bike through a graveyard. Turned the throttle arc too far and burned her calf on the tailpipe. Skidded quick and lost it on the gravel. The bath water draining out was rusty. She first learned of desire from the lusty sounds of pipes. The clinic doc shot Benzocaine in her knee, sliding the needle down, deep beneath her kneecap. Just like a spade slicing down to catch the under-roots of a tree. To dislodge something. To lever it out forever. Six times, beneath that knee, She felt the needle, the alloy, as she laid stiff on flimsy paper. A fish to be gutted. Piscine. The nurses scrubbed at her knee with wire brushes. The bristles were hypnotic, brusque— like brushes on a drum. They could have cut her open with filleting knives.