Paul H Williams, Vermilion Sands, 2010

Sometimes in the late afternoons we d drive out along the beach to the Scented Desert and sit alone by one of the pools, watching the sun fall away behind the reefs and hills, lulling ourselves on the rosesick air. When the wind began to blow cool across the sand we d slip down into the water, bathe ourselves and drive back to town, filling the streets and café terraces with jasmine and muskrose and J. G. Ballard, Prima Belladona. At sunset, when the vermilion glow reflected from the dunes along the horizon fitfully illuminated the white faces of the abandoned hotels, Bridgman stepped on to his balcony and looked out over the long stretches of cooling sand as the tides of purple shadow seeped across them. Slowly, extending their slender fingers through the shallow saddles and depressions, the shadows massed together like gigantic combs, a few phosphorescing spurs of obsidian isolated for a moment between the tines, and then finally coalesced and flooded in a solid wave across the halfsubme