The stone is aching-hot and rough. When she stands up, the backs of her legs will be mottled pink and white where her rumpled denim shorts end. But she blesses the warmth of the boulder and the heat of the scarcely perceptible desert breeze and the sticky hot-sap rolling of sunlight over her already peeling, bark-dry skin. She scrambled out of the wash over a scree of rocks worn smooth by long gone torrents of murky floodwater to get here, on the crest of the only hill in sight. She couldn't stand the shade anymore, never mind that even there her cheeks looked brushed with lily pollen and her close-cropped sandy hair stuck, dank and salty, to her scalp. No, she had come here for heat, for something that would soften her brittle chalky frigid bones into a sort of liquid gold that would run through her veins for the rest of the year. Something that would flow out to the tips of each short hair and make it glow instead of dirtying by extension the too-pink skin stretched taut over her angular (but not enough) cheekbones. Something that would swirl through her brain and turn it from a grey and aging parasite into a sun in its own right. Something that would keep her warm, stop the shivering, stop the sudden huddling into her black plastic office-chair, into her clean-cut navy blue suit, into anything but her chest, because that is where her heart is and why retreat from the unbearable cold into its source?

She sits with one leg tucked under her and the other dangling over the boulder's edge, staring at the Sun, eyes closed behind amber-tinted sunglasses. Warmth, yes, she has found warmth. Never mind what everyone says, that you never find what you're looking for in California, that the whole state isn't what it's cracked up to be. They're all looking in Hollywood, she thinks, or at the Golden Gate Bridge, or the San Diego beaches. What we grey-city people need, she thinks, is unbearable heat, something to take and suffuse us, just once. But she hasn't heard, or else heard but didn't understand, the other truism about California: that it is a place of extremes. That nothing there is real, but instead is inflated ever-so gently by the arid winds of the desert or the bracing ocean air into something larger than anywhere else. The poverty, the sprawling cities, the ocean, the redwood trees, the gossip, the heat. And so the desert valley beneath her goes a bit fuzzy, then begins a halting, irregular crawl (mirage, she thinks.) She suddenly feels dizzy, weightless, nauseous (finding myself, she thinks. Mountaintop experience.) Heat exhaustion. Dehydration. Her skeletal fingers on the searing rock tingle and twitch, and then it is finally happening, she just knows it, and she smiles, lips cracking and blood drying on the cuts almost instantly, as her marrow runs hot with liquid gold. Something in her ribcage is thawing, slowing. No more brittle bones.