For a long time no one in the village even knew they lived in a dessert. Like bacteria unfurling in a petri dish, members of the tribe got up each day and, in accordance with their own wants wills and desires perfected the art of ephemeral forever. They sang operettas, scrubbed crockpots, injected drugs, ran other over without the slightest hint of remorse, raised children and raised a boatload. They did this blindly, but only party so because somewhere the ghettos of each villager's soul, the bitter truth lay packing on meat.

Still, it took years before anyone understood that they'd soon be completely out of water.  It took another millennia or so before anyone could speak it aloud. But eventually, and here's where things really go awry, once every understood the reality of their situation and stood agape in the shadow of their present shamelessness, they did what came naturally to those unused to the indignities of self-incrimination. They panicked. And, as is usually the case with worriers, they tore themselves to pieces.

Despite their fear, however, the belief that things would get better was a so wrought in their schema, that no one save the passionately insane considered leaving the village for potentially greener fields elsewhere. Those who did were never heard from again—not to sound too terribly cliché.

Most villagers pitied the souls that wandered off, giving them up for dead or indentured servitude.  Still, as life in the village deteriorated, a certain divine lore emerged from the tracks of the departed, and tribes consolidated rumors and legends about those who left in acts camaraderie unheard of in days before the big drought. Patiently, the codified myth, parsing through what felt wrong and what seemed right. Unable to reconcile reality, villagers became fanatical in their pursuit of mystery. Historians slept with guns and typewriters were buried beneath inches of iron and concrete and brought out only on special, ceremonial occasions.

People no longer recognized their homes or families and drifted like wraiths through the necropolis. All villagers could focus on was a way out: out of reality, out of fantasy, out from under the sun, out from beneath the sun. They thirsted for escape, aching for it so strongly; that eventually it became the only method they had for identifying themselves.

Some escaped.

Gone.

Others remained; remembering and forgetting, diving in and out of themselves, pretending and not pretending, laughing but not really laughing, committing acts they always knew they would but feigning surprise at doing so. And then, of course, they all died.

Stuck.