Prompt: Coming undone | Words: 1200 exactly | Genre: Picaresque short fiction
Warning: contains swear words
There were just four things on Donny’s horizon: red-gray, belching, oil flares, shifting sand dunes piled high against the azure sky, the pumping station on the line up to Tobruk refinery and where on earth was the next drink coming from?
He was sitting on a hot, sand hillock (what else was there to sit on?) in the middle of the Sahara desert. Donny refocused on his nearer surroundings. Two sinewy, gnarled eucalyptus trees shooting high into the sky above his mini-oasis. Under a few more such trees about twenty meters away were two locals in white flowing Ramadan robes. They were clearly deep in conversation but since the conversation was in Arabic and Donny had never bothered to learn it in his fifteen years with the oil company so he understood nothing. He was about as interested in them as they were in him. Between Donny and the locals were two sheep whom Donny had befriended on the early morning flight from his oilfield to the pumping station.