The Cinderwell

A heat-vent fissure in a burn-break where a seam of old peat-and-resin under the chaparral has smouldered for years — warm to the hand, the air bad.

A crack in the rib-slope bleeds warm air and a faint orange glow from the slow underground burn below. Cinder-moths swarm the light; emberback beetles cluster in the warm dark inside. The Cinderwell is the only warm place in a cold desert night and will quietly kill a traveller who sleeps in it — which is the kind of joke the flats enjoy.