Sorry, posted an old version of the short story. Here is the final draft:

                                                                            Salvation
The air was thick and hot, and the singed desert gazed nervously up at the sun, which glared menacingly back down upon the desert and all its inhabitants as a snake would at its next kill. Like the rest of the desert, the stranded man looked up at the sky in pleading, praying to whatever deity would listen to allow that cloudless sky to break open, cease the endless tyranny of the sun, and sprinkle upon this forgotten, forsaken land the salvation of rain. The sky, however, carried as much indifference for the man’s predicament as the rest of the desert, obliging him nothing as it floated by far above his head. Wandering aimlessly, the man felt the sand shifting under his feet like the stirrings of a great behemoth beneath the surface of the earth, and began feverishly filtering through everything he had seen that could possibly give him water, without which he had but another 12 hours.

While the sun tortured him, the man wondered why, searched himself for a reason that was important enough to strand himself in the desert for. Then he had the sudden thought; this was not the first time he had found himself doing such a stupid and useless thing because someone had told him he couldn’t.

As he scanned the landscape once and again, he saw nothing save for miles of barren desert and knew the feeling of being pushed into insanity by the heat of the sun. Suddenly, something shifted on the sand, and his head snapped downward to track and observe the movement of the creature near his feet. A tiny lizard zipped across the dunes, gliding with minimal effort and taking no notice of the man staggering behind him. The man, hoping blindly that this lizard, which he would have thought of as miniscule and irrelevant in any other scenario, would lead him to that which he so very much needed, plodded behind it as it scurried up the dune, with each step taking more energy than the last.

When the tiny lizard scurried into a burrow, the man all but despaired, as he now had no more hope of finding water than before. While he despaired, his desperate mind was frantically searching for something to keep itself going, to give itself a goal to achieve, and save itself from the boundless lethality of having no hope of salvation. It snapped at the first opportunity it got.

Atop the magnificent dune the man stood following his pursuit of the lizard, and looking down upon a great, flat valley of sand. Water. There was water in the valley. Upon seeing this, the man half- charged, half- rolled down the dune, and the closer he got to the “water”, the further the illusion slipped away, until he had crossed the entirety of the valley to the other side, where the angle of the light changed as it reflected off this newly sloped surface, and the illusion dissipated along with the last of the man’s hope. Light reflecting about the crystalline grains of sand in the valley had created the illusory image of water, of salvation.

He simply laid down on the hillside, letting the sun char his skin off, not caring any longer if the indifferent environment turned his body into a pile of empty bleached bones. The man laid there because his brain could give him no reason to do otherwise. He thought that if his body were turned into a bleached skeleton, it would match his soul, the most critical component of which, hope, was wrung out and evaporated by the same brutal rays that now left his body in tatters. The man, like all humanity eventually must, accepted his place.


Author's note:
Mimic lines from Poe's "The Black Cat" are bolded. Original phrases are as follows:

found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not

aroused from sleep by the cry of fire

because I felt it had given me no reason of offence

This short story was written for Honors English 10 with the purpose of mimicking and implementing sections of famous author's writing.