Artwork by Michal Zilca

When their shift ends the girl has already decided to borrow one of the Jeeps. Speed and distance streak the trails over the surface of the desert, the red-brown color of something waiting to burn. In the morning, they will concede the road to tourists. Some will trickle out of their lux campsites, others will cling to their vacation the way the sun here can occupy the sky. Just for now though, the road is breezy, like them.

The town fits its life between a mountain range, the recreation area where the two of them rent out Jeeps, and two desert parks. The dust of it all is a sweeping mixture of sand, dirt, and even more dust. In the girl’s memories that compound is always there, stealing space from her lungs.

Why does you think no one stays? Her coworker, a boy from school, asks.

The girl is focused on the road. Mostly. Because it’s time to leave?

They pass the noncommittal church. It shares a parking lot with the motel that the boy’s grandmother refuses to sell. After that comes the liquor store where the son never carded and the father sometimes would but never for beer. They both learned to drive like this, by taking a right on to the abandoned road with a parent strapped into the passenger seat. The strip melts with the desert, the land’s way of reminding the town that it is changing faster than its children.

Finally, on the border of town and nothing much else for a very long time, is a miraculously still open store selling NEW AND U ED HOTUBS, urging people LIKE US ON FB.

The Jeep crests a clunky hill, breezing up on solid waves. The words organ donor peak are sprayed over a trail sign close to a cairn.

Did you do that? The girl asks. The boy shrugs; he can’t remember if this is the spot. From the Jeep car seat they can’t very well judge the distance left. The mountain might last forever.

—

Erica Macri is a 22-year-old writer who studied English and Economics at Boston College. She is a New Jersey native who has always felt like she has one foot in New York. Erica has an affinity for redwood trees, window seats, and dogs of all sizes.

More by this writer:

• You’re Actually Just Planted: Thoughts From Queer Eye
• Not Your Muse
• A Stepping Stone Heart
• I’m Trapped in a Relationship with My iPhone
• Hunting: On Valuing Vulnerability
• Nights That Taste Like You
• There’s a Life Stirring in My Gutters: A Poetry Collection

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Painting by Catrin Walz Stein

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