(Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma)

It infiltrates everywhere. Coating windowsills and forming precipitous piles against skirting boards, present in every corner. Tightly-sealed drawers are thrown open to reveal lightly-coated cutlery and tablecloths and t-shirts and hairbrushes. Books, untouched for years on crammed shelves, are opened to release sooty cascades from their spines. Each morsel of food, a beach picnic of old; every attempt to wash, a gritty exfoliation. Rubber seals around window frames and under doors are redundant, as it flows through keyholes, drifts through air vents, presses up between floorboards and rains from the cornices; a powdery invasion.

Outside, there is the perpetual battle against the grimy mounds that accumulate on the front porch, a daily struggle against absolute entombment. It’s easier now though. No longer the clamber up the rickety ladder, the mask narrowing vision and amplifying deafening asthmatic breaths, to sweep clear the roof panels. Not since distant, perpetual fires weakened the sun to a hazy, tepid shimmer.

Time is now marked in weeks. The hazardous journey to town along roads marked only by inactive pylons, the tyres sinking in fine powder, leaving behind a stilted wake. Waiting silently: the charging of the truck and the sole battery tasked with preserving life; the dwindling pages of tickets exchanged for plastic bottles of murky water and metallic vacuum packs. Waiting passively in a line that diminishes week by week.

Rushing home now, ahead of the approaching storm. A whirlwind of particles eddies across wooden floors as the door is slammed shut against the growing gusts. From the sofa in the front room, wrapped in grimy blankets, listening to the gale screech through the eaves, watching as the minuscule grains impatiently coat the glass. The drifts rising higher and higher until the dust blocks out all remaining light.

April 2017