An endless sea of sand...

Adam's mental activity was fuzzy, as if each act and thought was mired in syrup. His senses were equally lugubrious; he had almost no awareness of his surroundings except for a blurry divide between beige and white. The colors were very alike, making cognition difficult, but after a few moments his sight began to clear. Adam became aware that he was standing on a vast, empty desert, totally uninterrupted by dune, cactus, creature, or anything from horizon to horizon. As was his tendency when he lost his way, Adam looked skyward for guidance but found only white. Like the ground, the heavens were spotless and bright, though white instead of tan. They reminded the man beneath them of a winter sky, cloudy but pure. Was this some sort of dream? He took a tentative step, and the sand shifted normally beneath his feet. No vision assailed him, no sensations bombarded him, yet he could not shake the feeling that something was wrong. Where had he been last? It was hard to remember.

A pinprick of pain came suddenly to his wrist. Though the sensation was minuscule and dim, he recoiled nonetheless. Seconds later another hit him, but he couldn't see what was causing the tiny agony or where it was coming from. Adam whirled around, kicking up sand, looking in every direction before he figured it out: it was grains of sand that were hitting him. The ominous feeling from earlier was nothing more than a rising wind, blowing along some of the sediment from the strange wasteland in its wake. As he came to this conclusion, however, he became aware that more and more sand was blowing against him. He turned to face the wind for a split second and saw, to his surprise, a sandstorm raging his way. Still more than a thousand feet off, this squall stunned him. How had he not seen it coming just seconds ago when he looked every way to try and discover the nature of his surroundings? While he contemplated that, distracted, the dark, dirty cloud swallowed him up. Breathing was difficult, and the pain before that had been so scattered like a few raindrops was now a constant, intolerable deluge. Adam stumbled onto his back, unable to stop the dusty tide...

He awoke kicking, and a flood of relief washed over him. Morning sun peered through the unattended blinds. The storm, the sand, all were just a dream. A sudden realization hit him as he sat up and lifted an arm and found himself in the possession of a surprising vigor. Compared to the bumbling wreck he had been last night, he was right as rain. Muttering "Thank God" he sank back against the sheets. Sensations against his skin alerted him that something was wrong; the sheets were uncomfortable and irritating. He ran a hand across the pillow and felt numerous tiny grains that froze him in his tracks. There was sand in his bed--sand, only a dozen miles away from the New York-Pennsylvania border and dozens of miles away from the nearest beach. "How...?"

As it turned out, the presence of sand wasn't the only mystery in Adam's room. Thoroughly perplexed, the man stood up from the bed -still in the clothes of the night before- and meandered into the bathroom. On the way, he attempted to rub the remnants of sleep from his eyes only to discover with disgust that his hands were still pebbled with sand. After a thorough dusting he tried again but suffered the same result. Increasingly confused and annoyed, he yanked the sink faucets and washed his hands clean of all traces of sand. Third time proved to not be the charm, infuriatingly, and Adam was stupefied that the grains had managed to cling to his skin despite both dusting and cleansing. For the first time he actually looked at his hands, and witnessed -to his shock- grains of sand seemingly forming on his palms out of thin air. A new sensation took a hold of him: fear. With a violent motion he flung the sand off and hurriedly left the room, pausing his escape only to stop at the front desk to make sure that he had paid for everything and was clear to go. Moments later he was back in his car, staring at his palms once more. Not a grain of sand to be seen. He murmured darkly to himself and turned the ignition,