Redsand Canyon did he go on down the mountainside, and leave you all alone?

hope its ok i pop in here!

As always, he carried with him an excess of metaphorical baggage. Many of them were tagged with labels like curiosity and grief and insanity defense. Nemisis's relationship with Donovan was as foreign and obvious as a Martian volcano. It's vast mouth spewed black smoke. It choked him. The ash turned up in his food, in his mouth, in the water he drank. 

The smells are thick and overlapping-- they exude the distinctive warmth that a body leaves on the bed after they wake up. A wrinkled mattress, still bowed in from whoever's weight. Donovan. Nemisis. The vague, dark scent of strangers. And most of all, confrontation. He wasn't surprised. He suspected that Nemisis saw a gun barrel that was smoking more often than it wasn't.

They are two shadows on the red sand, one taller and lighter than the other. He kneels, one hand on a footprint, with the same solemnness of someone righting a tipped-over gravestone; not so much a practical task but a personal one. A state of being.