Party People. Flash.

Hunger is a raw feeling. Whether it's hunger for sleep or food. People are obsessed with the pain, but, pain is only the surface. When comes that deeper sensation, pain is puny and shrinking away and then it's nothing. In its place is the devil.

Walking through this desert, I can't tell you on the calendar where I am. I can't tell you for how many days and nights. The number times the sun has slid across the sky, and the bowling moon. The clouds and stars both have bared witness to my walking. Forever.

Several times when the sun and moon are there there with me in the waste, I have contemplated eating sand. My stomach has stopped. My piss is gone. The sun and moon both say, "yes, you should."

The stars shout, "do it."

Sharp wind. I walk and my lips are chapped. I crest a dune. I descend. So many times.

When my neck turns, I hear the crackling of something brittle. All I see is the sand and the heat dancing with the air. The sound was my neck's skin falling away, now there is only flesh and muscle. Across my forehead is another small tear the wind fingers open. The wind grips a flap and pulls, rips and there it is my skin carried away and falling away behind me.

Sharper wind, my head lowers to shield my eyes and my skull is a white cap. A gust finds the groove of my skeleton and rides down my spine, a skin cape is sent off. The wider view of my back shows muscle ropes untying. Falling off in wires.

I look up for a moment and it stings, I raise my hand, I close my eyes. The last thing I saw was the skin around fingers fraying, shredding off. Sand has made it into my bones and every movement there is the grind of grit against gristle.

Like it has been unzipped, the skin along my arm parts in half. Then the stuff it held underneath is loosed. There is no feeling anymore, anywhere.

You can see my radius bone, ulna. The humerus, the long bone, my shoulder blade, both shoulder blades like rough plates. My arms are still raised and my hands are outstretched to hold the wind back but the wind gets through, through the spaces between my bones, into my bones, killing the marrow.

Small bit by small bit those bones in my wrist fly off and my hands go limp. I am blasted back and my legs stumble to keep balance while the whole of my front is ripped away and there is the rib cage, the heart beating behind it, the heart that tears away and joins everything else in the wind, still beating and tumbling into the bright void. I fall to the sand. The last thing I hear is the wind whistling through my bones.