Seed at Zero: writing

The Companion
by Whitney Mower
 
Even though I don’t want to go, I follow him down trail that ends in construction. Down trail that ends in highway, stadium lights, he leads me early in the morning towards orange vests of workers, the color of which bleeds onto the surface of a small river.
Let’s get out of the house, he had said, before August is over. Then he took off his shirt and opened the back door where he knew the heat would find him.
Let’s get out of the house, he says again, even as we begin to walk.
The trail is paved, but swollen at the edges with growth. Any moment it may burst. Along the way he stops to puIl me against the chain link fence. Coarse fingers tighten below my jaw and I feel pulse through a wound on his palm he has refused to cover. He’ll let me cover other wounds, just not this one.
We kiss and he lets me free, his eyes with his mind turning to the sound ahead: a drill on concrete.
It reminds me of metal on human bone—the sound—as [...]

The Throat of Escalante
After dinner under the great red arch I took your hand and asked you to please come and have a smoke with me at a place I found where the rock comes up into the sky and frames the crescent moon. The wind was heavy and directionless and as we walked I could see it force itself into the curve of your back, pushing you forward, urging you to move, move faster. Our feet in our boots were a bit wet but not cold. Our hands were dry. Your open neck was burned and mine too but we were full on pasta and tuna and happy about the lizards and cactus flowers we’d seen and the canyon and the deep section of water we’d found that day for swimming.
I asked you a few questions about school and the desert. You knew a lot about the desert. But we were tired and had walked all day together and talking seemed irreverent that night there inside the walls of the deep gulch — a secret forest and small river concealed by miles of heat, sand, and brush. So we stopped talking. [...]