Photo by Carol Kiecker.

The rising sun gilds the rattling windows, the bus buzzes with ancient tongues: Amharic, Oromo, Somali. The air smells of coffee and spices.

Countless threadbare sacks line the aisles, stacked up, filled to burst. Their contents bleed about the floor until the floor is deep brown, sun yellow, fiery red, and grass green. The floor shakes and the colors shift under the passengers’ feet.

The land they pass is dry and rocky, full of jagged edges and primordial forms. Snaking ravines, craggy cliff-walls; land rent by time and cataclysm. Dead brown and living green bushes, a few camels, even fewer men. This place, the Ogaden, has been fiercely fought over for decades. The earth is brown, the sky blue.

They pass a tiny hamlet. Just three or four basic concrete boxes, covered in dust. An old, crooked man leans precariously on a stick, and a little boy stands next to him outside one of the structures. They wave as the bus passes.

Up an incline, and the steady hum of the tires grows fainter and fainter, the engine grows quiet. Gears grind, teeth clinch. The driver locks in, and the engine roars. Their backs press against their seats, and they eat exhaust, thick like cotton candy.

Everything of the bus quakes—the doors, the windows, the seats and their people, and the innards underneath. The entire affair seems like it will fall apart, yet the great mass of metal, flesh, coffee, and spices—held together by a few bolts and a little thread, tendons and bone—labors on.

Everyone laughs.

They come upon a rise, nothing but sky ahead. Like they will be hurled over the edge of the earth. The bus groans on. A grinding, a silence, a shudder, and a movement. They reach the top.

On the other side, the desert spreads out like a sheet. Flat and without edges, emptiness without end.