seccasaurus:

• They call them dark-sky cities. The stars are a brilliant canopy above the muted city lights, cars driving a bit more carefully in streets with shadows creeping around the corners. People shut their doors as the unseen shape moves slowly over the city, putting out the stars. The constellations flicker back as the shape passes, creeping out toward the scrub land.
• The tunnels are just a legend. They might have been there
  once, dark arteries beneath the city surface, havens from the heat or passages
  for migrant workers, but they’ve been filled in, collapsed, blocked off. The
  small echoes of footsteps beneath you are your imagination. You definitely didn’t
  see movement between the cracks of the sidewalk.
• The desert is wide, and you can see the shape of the earth
  from the high places. The mountains jut up from the city floor, the highway
  curving to avoid collision with those islands amid the suburban sea. The tall
  columns of overpasses are like monoliths as they swing above you, concrete and
  cement a modern-day marble to a modern-day Ozymandias. Prayers and
  supplications are in the currency of sirens and car horns, and the new gods accept
  their tithes in blood.

• There are sunglasses in your car. At your work. In your bag.
  In your hand. Someday, the desert-dwellers will evolve small lenses in their
  eyes, leaving the world with a permanent filter for UV.

• The clouds are rolling in now, the sky darkening with the
  promise of rain. The sky is gold, and then brown, and then red, but when the
  winds come the rain is only a lie. Thunder vibrates the power lines around your
  house and nothing pours from the sky but sand and small bits of paper.

• Your grandmother tells you not to look into the eyes of a
  skin-walker, but you do not believe her. Their eyes are like an animal’s, she
  says, but the man at your door has human eyes. You meet his gaze, and they reflect yellow in the
  porch light. It’s said that eyes are windows to the soul, your grandmother
  said, but for yee naaldlooshi,
  they’re more like doors.

• “At least it’s a dry
  heat.” The words come from cracked lips, in a weathered face,
  all moisture sucked from the skin in the slow dehydrator of summer. You hear
  the words echoing through the still air. Your tongue is dry in your mouth, and
  there is a film that tastes of dust and green chile. A dry heat. A dry heat. A
  dry heat.

  continued here.