Meadowlark Prairie mirage

Nonsense!

 

Sleep was somewhat insidious when hunger began to overtake someone. It was tempting. A blessed reprieve from the animal of emptiness tearing at your stomach. But while sleeping certainly didn’t take as much energy as wandering about awake, it wasn’t nearly as productive. Fortune could stumble across you when you were out on the roam; it very rarely did when you were dead to the world. So even when the going got tough, Cash liked to keep his body moving. It kept his endurance up, even though it was painful, and it carved out new opportunities—even though he hadn’t stumbled across any here yet.
 
Except stumbling across this woman, though that would do nothing to ease the emptiness of his stomach (he was not, unlike the other woman he had spoken to, quite ready to steep to eating his own kind just yet). Even after noticing him she remains lying down—it means she’s confident being alone with a stranger, which means Cash will keep a careful eye. He was an easygoing man, and he generally liked to handle himself with words rather than physicality, but that didn’t mean he was stupid enough to be naïve. She’s watching him too, closely, with an acuity that he’s beginning to perceive.
 
Interesting. But she wouldn’t read him. Cash was a sly one—he made himself appear like an open book, but he made sure all the words were wrong.
 
“They?” Her accent was peculiar, though he guesses he’s not one to talk. She might be from just as far away as he was, or perhaps he was just not as aware of the local tongues as he’d thought. “You meanin’ these?” He flicks the husk of a locust resting near his forepaw; it scatters away into a clump of twisted chaparral. “If so,” looking back up, shaking his head with gravity, “it’s the time after they’re gone that you have to worry most about.”