The sensation is dull at first, a vague disembodied irritation that seeps into my dreamland of shadows. I try to push it away and sink back into darkness, but the sensation is insistent. It hovers at the periphery of consciousness, calling me to morning. I’m already surfacing through a sleep like tar when the sensation intensifies into acute discomfort. Something is pinching me.

My eyes snap open. The dawn sky is pinkish and opaque with haze, like cotton candy dissolving. The silhouette of a bird is circling overhead. Several of them, actually.

To my right, the sensation happens again. A very sharp and painful bite. “Ouch!” I cry, and instinctively try to pull away.

But I can’t. I’m lying half-buried in a shallow bed of sand, and wedged against my backpack.

Feathers whirl. There’s another bite to my right hand. I flap around in panic, tossing sand everywhere, screaming a little, convinced a river of vultures are descending from the sky to plunder my carcass.

But when I sit up, I discover my attacker is actually a tiny brown bird. A sparrow of some kind, or maybe a wren. It hops around the nearby underbrush in an excited flitter, whistling at me. Meanwhile bottlenose flies are buzzing around me in a reflective storm that shimmers…and settles on my right hand…and shimmers into motion again when I shake them off.

In a heartbeat my panic turns into curiosity. I spilled beer on that hand the other day, a foamy pop-topping explosion — thanks to that stupid jerk of a store owner, who surreptitiously shook up the Budweiser I bought before sliding it across the countertop to me. Having some fun with the gringa. Ha ha ha. I hang my hand in space and watch the flies coat it…and the bird hop closer, eyeing the flies. It was snatching breakfast off my right hand in big juicy pecks.

Eventually I struggle to my feet, leaking sand like a sieve. The stuff is thick in my hair, trickling into my ears, turning my clothes into sandpaper. Worse, my skin is beginning to disappear beneath a grime of dust and dried sweat. No wait, this is the worst — that horrible odor I’m smelling? It might be me.

I need a shower, and a laundromat to wash the only outfit I have, and a store where I can buy a change of clothes, and breakfast for this growling stomach, and a bus ticket out of here, and a destination worth going to, and and and…

My head becomes a whirlpool of thoughts, all of them sucked down the drain called Nick. Because it’s so wrong that I’m alone in this Mexican nowhere. I shouldn’t have fled from him like this, and he should’ve stopped me, and now everything is ruined with truth — he’ll leave me someday. Not because he doesn’t love me. He does. He even said it once. No, he’ll leave me because he loves me.

I used to think love was something Nick feared, something he ran quickly from, but now I know better. He’s not afraid of love, he’s afraid of falling for a girl who can’t measure up to his rarefied ideal. He wants everything I’m not — an intellectual equal, someone whose life is built around a career, a sophisticate who knows things about wine and politics and alternative lifestyles, a bedmate who looks like the girls in Saman’s hidden porno magazines. Nick doesn’t want to be trapped by me, because he knows his love won’t last. He can’t stay with a stupid boobless crooked-eye girl like me, not forever and ever. Someday he’ll leave me, and with a child.

Beneath this dirty t-shirt, the heart that beats only for him is breaking into pieces, into countless grains of sand, into an entire desert.

Oh stop it, Nooshin. What will crying do? Just make your face look even worse, probably. And get a grip, girl — your heart beats for the baby too! Not much of a motivating peptalk…until I’m struck with an odd thought. What would Nick do?

When I think of my situation that way, I almost laugh out loud. Nick wouldn’t be caught dead sleeping in the open. He would’ve ingratiated himself with a stranger in town, or just knocked on doors and boldly asked to spend the night. And if for some inexplicable reason he actually did spend the night outdoors like this, he’d impose on someone for their bathroom and clean himself up and get invited to breakfast. He might even talk them into letting him use their phone — or omigod, giving him a ride back to civilization.

To me, those are just possibilities sheafed together. To Nick, it would all be part of a plan. He always has a plan. A couple dozen of them, percolating in his Machiavellian head, and he picks the best one.

Well, today I’m going to have a plan. I’m going to stride Nick-like into this decrepit falling-apart town, and I’m going to knock on every door I encounter, and I’m going to hide my crooked eye and flaunt my functional Spanish, and I won’t give up until I’ve had a shower and a chance to rinse out my clothes and even a free breakfast!

An hour later I trudge back into the general store on the plaza, my backpack leaden, rivers of sweat carving through the grime on my skin. The owner is just as stoic and unblinking as ever, although his eyes narrow and his nostrils flare at my atrocious smell. Neither of greets the other with “buenos dias”.

“Give me a beer,” I sigh in Spanish, reclaiming the same wooden bench where I spent most of yesterday and the day before. “A Budweiser. And don’t shake it up this time.”