Photo: K. S. Brooks

“Get up, you fool.”

I felt, rather than heard, the brrrrt and the whoosh of air nearly brushing my cheek.

Slowly becoming conscious, I was aware, through the red glow behind my eyelids, the smell of hot dust, that daylight had arrived in the desert.

“What are you waiting for? You never finish anything unless I’m putting my boot up your backside.”

“Aunt Wray?”

“GET. UP.”

I rolled over and let the waking aches and pains ease up somewhat. I’d been following a smuggler through the Sonoran Desert, and was now somewhere west and south of Phoenix.

Through the heat waves shimmering above the valley floor, I spied a hummingbird as it momentarily settled onto a mesquite branch about five feet away.

“Aunt Wray? Is that you?”

“You’ve still got a day’s walk. Deadline is tomorrow, but you’re not going to get it done in time.”

Friends always marveled at my sheer audacity in these journalistic ventures. I always told them it was my Aunt Wray that pushed me through them.

They didn’t know that she had died some years before, always appearing to me in the guise of a native animal.

“Let’s go.” She landed on my shoulder and caressed her head on my cheek.

Something in her voice made me look back.

And there I was, lying where I had died the night before, the dysentery that had killed me soiling my pants, my teeth bared in a rictus grin, hands curled like claws in the morning air.