The cult was gone.

It happened quietly one morning, or perhaps they had been slowly effusing deeper into the wild lands for a while now. Wish Bone did not know the answer. All he could remember in recent memory was the passing of the sun overhead, the color of its light changing from the pure white power during the day and slowly becoming a rich spiritual flame as it dipped into the ground. Those hours when the angle was low and the rays were warm were the best hours for Wish Bone to actually see things. He would hold out his hands in front of himself and stare at how the dusty red rocks bolded the lines of his palms.

Beyond his hands, the late hours of the day offered the best chance to look at the two-tailed lizard that wandered into the circular hut. In the morning, it would squeeze through the cracks in the wall. Sometimes it would not return for a few days; it was a wild animal, after all. But still, it would make its return and stare at Wish Bone, and Wish Bone would stare at it. That was the new way to pass the time. Sometimes he thought about home, too.

Then there were the nights. The sky was surprisingly clear and black, dusty blue, and radiating. The stars almost seemed new through the gaps in the roof. Their light seemed to stream in as lines during dustier twilights. It was almost like you could reach out and grab it, but you couldn't. The lizard would not touch these beams but would scurry between them all like they were trees in a forest and it was a much larger beast. And when it would tire, the lizard would lay itself on the ground near Wish Bone—just close enough to feel the heat of his flesh. Its body curved inward, and the tails faced the two tails, forming the shape of a tight curve. Its abdomen would rise and fall in slumber. And as the night moved, the moonbeams never seemed to cross its form. What would happen if they did? What would happen?

When the nights were windy, it carried whispers into the hut. There were the screams of deer and the temptations of shrews and vultures and devils and people. And at the same time, there were apologies. And words from the lizards. The voice was low and unintelligible, and if you tried to pay attention to only it, it would not be there. So the voice was always a secondary thing. A secret etched into primary stillness or a pace of time moving that existed outside of the regular flow—a rhythm that was unattuned to the distant hum of civilization.

Sometimes, as he lay on the cold earth, the weight of the sky pressing down on him, Wish Bone would close his eyes and try to remember what it felt like to be surrounded by the familiar, the known. He'd conjure the faces of those he once knew, their features becoming more abstract with each passing day, like the endless rise and fall of desert dunes. They were sometimes clear and sometimes cascading back into blurs. The world he had left behind seemed like a dream now—a series of disjointed memories that had no place in his slight and new reality.

In these moments, things were an unbroken loop where time folded in on itself. It was easy to get lost. The weight of the past was no anchor to him. He wondered if he was slowly becoming like the lizard—an anomalous part of the wild, idle, primal, and idyllic lands. He had not eaten but revealed no wasting. Perhaps, he thought, that was the point of it all—to become something else, something that belonged to the earth and the sky and nothing else. Something that moved through the world without leaving a trace. Something that was not huntable or known.

A night like that was the one that preceded a moment where the quietness from the east married the decay from the west. Usually, there would be the shuffling of boots outside on the gravel and sand. Usually, Wish Bone could smell the sandy air mixing with the taste of propane as meals were cooked on open stoves. All of it silent as could be, but still unmistakably telling their story. This time, there was none.

From the other side of the wall, there really was no one. It seemed that in the shifting of the winds, they were simply obliterated by an unknown cause—not man nor monster nor neither nor both. The last one gone was that powerful woman, the one who wore the face paint and donned the contacts and, above all, just wanted to keep her people safe. With all of her people gone before her, she stood at the very edge of their reality and stared first at the tree. She made a promise to herself to never stare at it once she felt that things were safe. She was bad at keeping certain promises, though. After all, she never killed the hunter.

Instead, she stood, and in one of her hands was the bones of a rabbit. In the other was the clavicle of a vulture. Long ago, she had once said that she and her people were rabbits and they needed to escape the vulture. That much they knew. And although it was balanced for the prey to be predated, it was not a balance they were willing to suggest. And so they left. That was their harmony, that was their harmony to keep.

She was unsure if she still believed it, but it didn't matter now. The rabbit bones were already withering away in the gust. The fading glow of the city against the rising sign was like a borealis that was steadying its wave. Her fingers were waning, too. She sighed and split the vulture bone in two. It split perfectly down the middle. She had never gotten that before, and so she smiled, and she couldn't stop smiling. The smile was so grand that she betrayed the silence that was so dear to her and her people and let out a laugh while she gripped the bone. It didn't matter though; the split was even. So she and her people could really disappear, just like she had asked the west that morning.

The west forgot her like a bad dream. It forgot all of them—all their made-up tales, the ones that had shaped and decorated them. All their scribbled papers and ponchos. The vultures that flew above and the rabbits that saw from afar forgot. It took longer for the sand beneath their feet or the tree that had loved them to forget until they realized they no longer bore any suggestion of their presence. Occasionally, however, the wind rounding the curve of a jackalope horn and the static of cactus thorns touching stirred a memory of something familiar. But they didn't touch the thought because they knew things were not supposed to be the same way after the woman broke that bone.

As her form slowly evanesced, she set the other one down in the sand and pointed towards the city.

Just as she joined her community, Wish Bone was then allowed to join his. The walls around him seemed to fall, but neither out nor in. Really, it too ceased to exist. Soon, the sun shined down on Wish Bone with a weight that was no longer familiar. Around him was an empty corner of desert plateaus that would be forgotten as soon as he stepped out from them, seemingly swallowed up by the crazed world it dared to engage with.

So Wish Bone sat there alone. In front of him, the sand bore the imprint of a two-tailed lizard curved fully around where it formed a circle. There was no sign of departure. It, too, had vanished. There really was nothing left.

Wish Bone lingered in the stillness, his body heavy with the gravity of solitude, the silence around him almost palpable. The sun bore down with a relentless weight, and the air shimmered with heat, causing the horizon to waver and distort as if reality itself were uncertain if he was going to do what was next. He could feel the emptiness pressing in on him, a vast, yawning absence where life and movement once existed.

Slowly, he exhaled, the breath leaving his lungs in a steady stream, carrying with it the last vestiges of what had been—a way of life, a community, a purpose in submission and defeat. He felt as though the very air around him had thickened, making each movement deliberate as if the world were conspiring to hold him in place, to keep him rooted in this moment of transition.

But even within this desolation, a faint trace of instinct stirred, urging him to move, to rise from the ground that had anchored him for so long. His limbs felt stiff, almost foreign as if they had forgotten their function during the long period of stillness. Slowly, with a groan of effort, Wish Bone began to push himself up, his hands pressing into the gritty sand beneath him. The earth, warm and unyielding, resisted him at first, as if reluctant to release him from its grasp.

His knees wobbled as he found his feet, his body swaying slightly as he adjusted to the new perspective. For a moment, he simply stood there, feeling the sun's rays on his face, the heat a stark contrast to the coolness of the night before. As he rose to his full height, the landscape stretched out before him, an endless expanse of red and gold, broken only by the jagged silhouettes of distant plateaus.

He looked down. In the sand was half of a wishbone, torn perfectly down the center. Crouching down, he picked it up and thought about home. In a way, it was as close to a wish as he could make. Standing back up, he began to slouch through the long, dry expanses back home.

***

In Burnside, the days slipped back into a rhythm—one that was familiar yet carried a new undercurrent, a quiet shift in the pattern that was both comforting and strangely invigorating. Wish Bone found himself engaged in the same tasks as before—helping Mirage and her son fend off another encounter with the melon heads and selling lizard tails in the empty lots of Idyll. But there was a subtle difference now, a change in how he perceived these actions.

Where once the repetition of days might have felt like an endless, monotonous loop—a cycle without a clear beginning or end—he now recognized it as something more profound. It was not an entrapment but rather a dance, a continuous interplay between two complementary forces. Each day was a rounding of the curve, and just as one movement reached its apex, the other was already beginning to rise. It was a balance, a harmony of motion that felt natural and right.

The work was steady and unremarkable, yet it carried a sense of purpose, a quiet fulfillment that had eluded him before. There was a satisfaction in the routine, a recognition that each day, though similar to the last, was also different in its own small way. The challenges were familiar, yet they brought with them new insights, new ways of seeing the world and his place within it.

And so, as the days passed, Wish Bone moved through them with a sense of ease, of acceptance. He no longer felt the weight of time pressing down on him, nor the fear that he was trapped in a cycle that would never end. Instead, he saw it as a seamless flow, an endless switching of two bound movements, each one necessary to complete the other. It was a rhythm that was both ancient and ever-renewing—a dance that he was a part of and that gave his days meaning.

***

Within this groove, the minutes passed with ease and in mass. Porterhouse stopped by occasionally and it was nice. In time, he found himself in the center of a neighborhood known poorly to the municipality in which it is a part. Wish Bone sat in a lawn chair, a beer in hand, and surrounded by his neighbors, watched the annual firework show. If you looked around, you would find neither red ponchos nor rabbits that stared for too long—only a good night, one of a long streak it dared not break.

***

The following morning was just like the others. After making his way through the kitchen, he sat in his backyard and enjoyed the low murmur of early morning and the subtle rise of the lizards in their cages—except for one.

A single lizard lay on the lawn in front of him. The rest of the brood was at attention in the cage, staring. And while he could've guessed that it escaped, he knew that was not true. He remembered these markings before. It was from out beyond the city, placed there without a sign of arrival.

As Wish Bone squatted, he remembered the long nights outside the city for the first time. It made him shiver. Still, he brought his hands down and picked up the lizard in his hand. As it curled in his hand, it again formed that circle by biting the tail. It was quiet as it lay, and there was a moment of choice for fear or joy.

Wish Bone's eyes followed the line endlessly. He followed the scales and tail and mouth and scale and tails and mouth. He saw the eyes of the lizard and wondered if, when it saw him, if it too thought about cycles. If, in a way, both of them were an ouroboros.

As he watched, the lizard opened its mouth to breathe again. As it did, it slid its mouth and body over, biting down on the second tail and exposing the first to the air. And then it did this again and again and again. The two remained there for hours, Wish Bone watching the switching of tails and, as a result, the switching of memories in the endless around. When it changed, maybe it broke the memories out, or maybe it kept them in.

As the morning sun began its slow climb, casting gentle shadows across the backyard, Wish Bone's gaze remained fixed on the lizard's spiraling dance. Its body coiled and uncoiled in an endless loop, an almost imperceptible rhythm that seemed to whisper of time's secrets. The backyard, usually a place of mundane solace, now pulsed with intensity. The air, once filled with the ordinary sounds of dawn, seemed to carry an unseen weight—a whisper of a story that was both familiar and distant. The lizard, in its undulating motion, traced patterns that felt like echoes of forgotten memories, lost in the folds of existence.

Eventually, he set the lizard down and it disappeared into the hidden corners of the yard, a profound stillness settled over Wish Bone. He remained seated, his eyes distant, as if he was not entirely present in the moment but rather lingering on the edge of something profound but disappearing again. The light continued its ascent, casting long shadows that danced with the breeze, and in that moment, Wish Bone felt those that were unseen, the cycles of his life and the lizard's silent dance and more. He felt these were watched by eyes that were both his and not his. But that did not matter. It was nice and it was quiet. A deep, resonant stillness was enjoyed, and the world seemed to let go of its breath as it accepted that what it had always had was neither an end nor beginning but only ever a place where two things met—a vague form, a life and all its memory, a wishing bone, or a tail.