“It’s only a mirage. It’s only a mirage!” -he repeated to himself.
Oscar had just woken up and saw something awful in front of him. There was a body being consumed by vultures lying on the sandy floor of the scorching desert. He looked harder at the corpse for it looked very familiar. He felt a chill all over his body. Oscar took a step back horrified and gagging.
He closed his eyes and he began to cry desperately, but no tears came. A sudden strong wind blew over him spreading sand everywhere. Oscar turned away and covered his face with his hands. Then it stopped. He stood up and looked towards the place the vultures where devouring the body, and there was nothing.
“It was a mirage,”- he said in a hopeless way.
He walked in search for some source of water to survive, and as he did, he felt lighter. But at the same time, the desert kept getting unbearably hot. Oscar walked for endless miles gradually feeling lighter, but hotter at the same time. He could not understand what was happening, but kept going refusing to loose hope. Suddenly, in the distance he saw what he was looking for, an oasis. Oscar hesitated not knowing if it was an illusion or reality.
“What if?”- Oscar wished.
Then he got a rush of excitement. “This most be it, I know it,”- he was determined not to stand there a second more guessing himself, for his life depended on it. So he ran as fast as he could, looking straight to the oasis just in case it was a pigment of his imagination.
When he reached the oasis, Oscar dropped to his knees. The water looked cool and refreshing. Oscar submerged his hands in the water, but it went straight trough them and he noticed they were not even wet. He tried again just in case he was hallucinating, but got the same results as the first time. Oscar freaked out backing away from the water.
“What’s happening?”- he said out loud, putting his hands on top of his head.
Oscar felt dizzy and lost, and couldn’t understand what he was experiencing. Then he heard the squeak of a bird. He looked at the sky where a bird was passing by in an ode kind of way. A terrible thought came to his mind and he remembered an unbearable scene. The birds he saw before where really consuming a body and it was his own.
“That could mean only one thing. I am dead!”- He realized perplexed. “It can’t be,”- he argued with himself. Oscar remembered blacking out, and when he regained consciousness he saw the birds feasting upon his flesh. The wind that blew strongly afterwards covered his cadaver, saving it from the hungry vultures. Oscar fell to the ground numb.
“I am a ghost wandering the sandy desert,”- said bewildered. He got up and looked once again at the water with sadness. “How could it be that I can’t drink water, but still feel the unbearable heat of the sun and the thirst in my mouth? If I am a ghost, I should feel nothing at all.”
These words made him very nervous, and looked around in panic. He felt hotter! Oscar backed away from the oasis, always in the look out. He heard cynical laughter from far away getting closer to him. When he closed his eyes, a sudden burst of heat surrounded him.
“Now I understand why the water was out of my reach,”- Oscar said crying, while he heard the sarcastic laughs right beside him, realizing his eternal fate.
