No one ever believes the wind is so strong...Not, at least, until it hits them.

She always picked up handfuls of the red dirt and put it in some random container when she was going back to her birthplace. Oh, she knew it wasn't just her habit. Humans always copy each other. She did it just the same.  The dirt in that place was special.  It was dry, not quite sandy, but it was dry and tough, and a dark red.  Not unlike the people there, strange, colorful, and tough.  In the old days they had to survive this land. She remembered the stories. Maybe saving some of the dirt would help her remain strange, colorful, and tough, too.  She could hope as she shut lid of the plastic container for this time. The wind in the place was loud, fast and often a solid wall of air forcing itself across the flat areas. It could help and it could kill, all in the same mood.   Had she survived?  Maybe, maybe not.  She ran the first chance she got.  Still always the powers of the dirt and the wind calling.

*******

It was the red dirt and the wind that she thought of when she got the call. It was cancer.  And why shouldn't it be?  It had taken the rest of his immediate family, in one version or another.  And she knew what was ahead.  The sickness, the cures that maybe worked and had their own sickness, and the fear and the sadness.  

It had been a long journey.  He had taken a long time to grow up. And later with a few stories, only a few, she understood why.  She also understood how lucky she actually was in the whole thing, and how the buck would actually stop with her.  We never get to hear enough stories from people. Enough that we can truly understand how their actually made, and how they arrived right here, in the minute.  She got it, and the few stories would probably be all she got, and maybe she was just lucky enough to have gotten those.

She would like more time. Hell, he was the one with the cancer, he probably wanted more time, too. He took comfort that there was a God. She didn't think there was one, to be so cruel with time, and saw the possible finality of it all. Either way it sucked. It really did just suck.

Nothing can take one back, way-way back, like bad news. She hung up the phone. She put on the quiet music, opened the window for a breeze. She poured the tall glass of whiskey neat, and lit a cigarette.  She pondered all the stories, the red dirt, the violent wind, and wrote this.