You can tell a house by its smells. A farmhouse has wet smells, sour goat milk, and chickens. An artist's house smells of torment and turpentine. This wood house, empty in the desert, had risen amid the space of its own doorways, and with years in the incandesce smelled only of blown dust. I walked in, covered in desert coloring, and started sleeping on its floor.

To begin each day, I sat in the doorway and watched the tips of distant mountains before dawn. The light filled. The evening was its reverse: the mountains folded when evening arrived, and the light told the house, put your eyes down; now turn your face a bit. Then the desert was dragged flat.

All changes are like stepping stones and you should leave each one quickly. But this house was an island, with no water to fall in, and no one knew I was here, so I stayed. This way also, I could leave my past.

So it was with surprise that I woke on the floor in the middle of the night to see Samantha and check how she smelled. She was in the doorway holding a lighter up. 'Not very comfy,' she said. 'Why don't you get a couch, so I can sleep here.'

I jolted. 'How did you get here?'

'Following my feelings.' She had a swagger; excess pieces to her walk.

'Across the desert from Bakersfield? Do you have any money?'

She shook her head.

I showed her the dawn.

'It's not very tidy,' she said of the view, next morning.

A wind started, which curved the grit all the way to the mountains.

'Here,' I said in the undulating light, 'hold to the door frame and you will see the day begin with a silent red disk.'

'It's angry,' she said. 'I am angry,' she said, 'incomplete when I am alone.'

But together, I pointed out, we have perpetual storm. She shrugged. Her voice echoed as she inspected the rooms here: 'And you cannot not have a mirror in your bathroom.'

The wind grew and dragged wildly and she held the doorframe. The evening steadied, and then the hills arrived.

She was beginning to arrange things. She found the bent finger of water in the ground a hundred yards away, and she figured how to collect from it in bottles; she found a rag so she wiped off the windows. She scraped grit from the old hinges so the doors closed; she arranged desiccated flowers in a brown bottle. The house was changing with new aromas: resentment, and her hair spray, her dissatisfaction, her leather boots. She had settled in.

'Out,' she said.

I left by dawn, traveling with no money.

Each morning the house began with an arpeggio of colors that I would miss. Perhaps for her, the next sunrise would be tidy.

I looked back and saw her outside, squatting to pee.