Excerpt from Evidence of Things Unseen: A Novel

By Marianne Wiggins
Simon & Schuster, June 2003 ( 400 pages, $25.00 )
Hardcover, ISBN: 0-684-86969-1
FICTION/General

White Sands

Somewhere in the heart of North America there is a desert where the heat of several suns has fused the particles of sand into a single sheet of glass so dazzling it sends a constant signal to the moon. On a map, this unmarked space looks like a printer’s error, an empty region on a page the cartographer forgot. One way or another each of us is drawn to this forbidden place. Like a magnet, this glass desert calls our irons the way the whale’s heart used to beckon a harpoon. In our dreams or in our fears we imagine what it must be like to walk upon this surface. We imagine we could balance there, like an angel lighting down on ice, glissade, perhaps, without cracking its thin shell with the weight of our existence. This desert’s name is Trinity. One day the sun rose twice there in a single mourning and Man saw his face reflected on the underside of Heaven. When the first atomic bomb exploded over earth that morning, the entire sky broadcast the news. Creation of the universe, that day, was reenacted. This time, God was not the only audience. If birth is fission, then the love we make is fusion; and to make an End is nothing more than to realize a Beginning. Because the end is where we start. Somewhere in the heart of North America there is a desert made of glass. Reflected in that glass there are two lovers, twinned for all eternity, the shape of all their days preserved like history’s signature in stone. The love preserved, like wings, in amber.