Joe sat on the rusted, red baked earth; an ancient earth created from ancient mountains, worn down over millennia to gently rolling hills and lapped by sun burnt soil. An easterly wind whipped the parchment dry land into dust, lifting it into the air in the form of spiralling, choking clouds which coated everything in a pinkish shroud. Even Joe looked a dusky pink, although no-one could mistake him for anything other than a native of this land.

Joe had no real measure of time passing. Day piled upon day, as he walked through the open landscape, counting time by the procession of waterholes and food stores. Witchetty grubs on the first day, tubers the next, honey ants, lizards, rodents, birds; so long as he could dig with his digging stick and throw his father’s spear, he knew he would never go hungry nor thirsty.

God will provide – his mother said
The land will provide – his father said

Now he rested awhile on the cracked and crusted ground and thought of God, as his gaze rolled over the landscape. It alighted on small patches of vegetation nestling in small dips in the surface and on the shadows at the base of a rock face: places where he might find water by the simple act of digging down a few feet into the loose packed soil. But there was no urgency in his search, for the moment he was content just to sit and look.

Presently, a six-legged creature, its shiny black coat glistening in the mid-day sun, crawled out from under a rock and stopped in front of him.
A scorpion. Small but deadly.
“Have you come to help me?” asked Joe.
The creature made no reply, but raised its claws and arched its tail.

Do not show fear – his father said
All creatures are precious unto god – his mother said

Joe feared the scorpion, a primal fear telling him to escape, or stay and fight. He considered snatching up his digging stick and crushing the vile creature at his feet. Or, he could run away, retrace his steps back to the last watering hole, half a day’s trek from here.
Or, he could remain seated, keep very still, and not provoke it into attacking him.
It was his choice, just as it had been his choice to walk into an area that god had seen fit to leave to the scorpions.

The creature crawled towards Joe’s leg and, slowly, carefully, he reached down with his spade-like hand and allowed it to scuttle onto his palm. There he cradled it, contemplating the fragile line that separates life from death.
If the scorpion should strike now, the single sting from a creature weighing little more than a few grains of sand, would kill him before he could reach any help.
Gently, he lowered his hand onto the ground, holding it flat out for the scorpion to scramble off, tickling his palm as it went.

Then, in the line between earth and sky Joe settled back and died.

The scorpion he had cradled so gently had not been the one to deliver the fatal sting. That had come from its companion, hiding in the black shadow of a crack in the ground. Joe had known the moment it struck his bare ankle that he was dead, but he’d seen no reason to kill its mate simply as a final act of revenge.
Unshackled from this earth, Joe took one last look at the body, resting as though asleep among the ancient hills of his birthright, and left it to the tender ministrations of the sun and the winds and the creatures of that land.

Eventually the sandstorms cleared, to be followed by the annual rains, turning the brick red dust to an ochre mud in which a gaudy wreath of flowers bloomed around the bleached white bones of a skeleton, the hand still resting palm upward on the ground, as a family of scorpions scuttled between the chalk-white fingers, cradled in the bosom of the Scorpion Hills.

End.