“It was my heart,” he insisted, thumping on his chest. Jim Singer, who managed the sandwich shop in the monument district, said that he had felt a prickling sensation in his fingers and then stopped breathing. It was only at that moment, he said, with a million arrow-points of sand striking his skin, that he had truly realized he was dead. The sound was as clear as any he had ever heard. He had walked for days and days, until the dunes broke apart beneath his feet, surging up around him to lash at his face, then everything went still and began to beat like a heart. He said that the desert was bare and lonesome and that it had hissed at him like a snake. He told the story to everyone who would listen, bobbing his head to follow the sound of their footsteps. First he had died, he said, and then- snap!-the desert. When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had travelled across a desert of living sand.
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