Editorial Board: Kelly Sargent, K.D. Zwierz, Colby Flade, Noah Evan Wilson, Candi Martin, Brian "Brie" Sheridan, Roberta Laurie
Front Cover art: Do Not Disturb by Tiffany Tuchek. Tiffany is an emerging writer, photographer and watercolor artist. She lives in Michigan with her husband and rescue pets - three dogs and four parrots. She enjoys reflecting the powerful and fragile aspects of life through poetry and photography artwork.
Back cover art: The Metro Hotel in Petaluma, CA by Patricia Cannon. Patricia has been a Registered Nurse at UCSF since 2001. With over two decades of experience, she has worked in various areas of critical care, including cardiac and neuro-intensive care, hematologyoncology, and school nursing. Outside of her work at the hospital, Patricia finds refuge and creative expression through her faith, photography, and poetry.
115 Brothel Rooms and Butcher Shops by Preston Eddings
117 Letter to the Housemaid by Lina Buividavičiūtė
113 Freundinnen by Adriana Stimola
Open. Close. Welcome. Good-bye.
Britta Stromeyer
Britta Stromeyer is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Her writing appears in The Common, Tupelo Quarterly, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bending Genres Journal, Necessary Fiction, On The Seawall, Marin Independent Journal, and other publications. Britta has authored award-winning children’s books and holds an MFA from Dominican University, CA, an M.A. from American University, and a Certificate in Novel Writing from Stanford University.
She had made love with married men in hotels with burning desire. She had strolled along Rue Saint-Honoré & Piazza Navona. Visited the Prado Museum, Schloss Schönnbrunn. Dined in trattorias, bistros, cafés, meticulously researched and organized in manila folders.
She had impeccable taste.
Back up elevators to their suites in Rome, Madrid, Vienna, Paris, London they whispered into each other’s pillows, her body gently folded into theirs. There, she led them through the labyrinth of her soul, lacerations of the past, carefully filed away into the vaults of her paramours’ hearts. Then, with scorching devotion, they would make the best kind of love— the kind that lasted through the night, evaporated in the morning.
So many vaults.
Now, unshackled, she waits in a motel lobby two miles from home. Sipping instant coffee, she stares at the thin-lined bleached skin once wrapped by her wedding band. She waits until her single room is clean, her conscience clear.
A cut-rate lonely suit enters the lobby and winks at her with searing intensity. Open. Close.
Simpering, she feels the lines around her tired eyes folding. Smoldering affection.
Welcome. Good-bye.
Motel Big Star
Stephen Barile
Stephen Barile is a Fresno, California native, an award-winning poet and 2023 Pushcart Prize nominee. His poems have been published widely in both print and online.
It was the same room
Downstairs on the inside
Of the "L"
Where she took me, Grabbed a white towel
From the stack
On the broken-down dresser
The mirror no longer clearly reflected,
Went to her frantic work.
At the haggle, I told her I had fifteen dollars. When the time came
And I opened my wallet
I counted thirteen dollars.
What happened?
She told me to get out.
And don't come back.
Such a different response
From when I found her standing
In short shorts and a halter top
Between the oleanders
On Golden State Boulevard, 11:00 on a Tuesday
Looking pale like a creature
Of Monday night
Awaken too early
When I was supposed to be
Picking up hydraulic fluid filters
In the company truck. Things were more cordial
At dusk this night
When Jimmie led the way. We crossed the asphalt lot
In my AMC Pacer, parked
The only car, curtains moved In darkened windows.
He knew which turquoise door, Of some with numbers, To knock on. She opened, A different girl, the same Motel, the Big Star.
T.V. light came through the gap
Held by the brass chain. I stood behind him
Trying to get a look at her.
There were signs of abuse, Her face looked melted, Held up by too much make-up
A yellow tube top, soiled
White shorts, pink skin, blonde. Cigarette smoke rolled out, The haze glowed blue, She whispered to Jimmie. The only thing I heard Was the word Later.
A black and white police car
Drove up behind us, the door Slammed shut. The officer got out, "Whaddaya doin' here?"
Jimmie said, "Just visiting." "Go home," the cop said, Emphasizing the word home.
Room 303
David Horn
David Horn is a speculative fiction writer whose work explores the haunted intersections of memory, identity, and silence. His stories have appeared in Neon: Origami and AntipodeanSF. His debut collection Signals from the Edge was released in 2025, and a new volume, The Glass Child, is forthcoming a collection in much the same spirit. He is also completing several longer works, including Raid on Ploiești (a historical novel), The Sword of Kings (a young adult adventure featuring the search for Excalibur), and Echoes of Calico Bend (a horror western). He lives in Colorado, where he writes quietly and never fully checks out of Room 303.
Somewhere off a forgotten exit, just past the edge of memory, stands a hotel that never quite closes. It’s been painted over, remodeled, and repackaged, but the bones remain the same. Tonight, a man named Charles steps inside not to rest, but to remember. Not to escape, but to face something he once left behind with the do-not-disturb sign still swinging on the door. The room he checks into is quiet. Ordinary. But as with many things we think we’ve outgrown, it’s been waiting.
*
He hadn’t intended to stop. Not when he was so close. The cemetery was just another twenty minutes up the road. But west of the old viaduct, his hands started to ache and his vision blurred at the edges. His chest felt tight. A dull fire behind the sternum. The exit sign came and went before he thought about it.
The first hotel off the highway stood there like an afterthought. Chain-owned, repainted, faceless. He pulled in, parked, and checked in without a second glance. Just a bed. That’s all he needed.
“You’re in 303,” the clerk said, rapping the keycard off the counter. “Corner room. Good view.”
Charles hadn’t asked for anything. Just handed over his name and credit card and nodded when the kid said breakfast was at seven.
He took the rickety elevator up in silence. When it finally opened, it did so with a sigh. The hallway smelled faintly of lemon and mildew. Anonymous carpet. Dim light. The kind of flickering neon tube you find in every aging hotel.
He walked down the hall until he reached room 303.
He stood there for a moment, blinking. Worn brass numbers. A small cartoonish sticker on the door, something scrawled there once, now sun-faded to near illegibility.
The number meant nothing at first. Just a coincidence. Just a room. He slid in the keycard and stepped inside.
At first glance, it was nondescript. Ordinary. A pit stop in an unremarkable chain by the highway. The headboard was new. The drapes were new. But the floor creaked in a particular patch by the window and that stopped him. He pressed his toe there again. Same hollow sound.
In the bathroom, the mirror misted in a strange, patchy pattern when he ran the tap. The crack in the tile low, by the toilet was still there, jagged like a lightning bolt.
That was when it hit him.
Not a resemblance. Not déjà vu.
The same room.
After all these years, after all that road, it was the same room they’d stayed in when they first arrived from California. When everything had felt like a beginning.
He backed into the main space and sat on the bed. It creaked under his weight. His hands rested on his knees. His breath came tight.
“How the hell does that happen?” he murmured.
He was so close now. The cemetery, just a little farther upstate. But it had been a long road, and his body creaked and groaned, his chest hot with every mile.
Charles had never thought of himself as a coward. He’d done hard things. He’d come to terms with disappointment. Survived love.
And yet Marian—she had lived in a locked room in his mind, all these years, with no key. Not because he couldn’t remember, but because he didn’t want to feel it again.
And now it was his turn. The diagnosis had come quiet and clinical: slow growing, they said. Treatable. Non-urgent. But it hovered. A shadow just off-center.
He hadn’t told anyone. Not yet. Some days it felt like punishment. Other days, like permission.
Maybe that’s why he finally came.
A little after six, a knock.
“Housekeeping,” a woman’s voice said.
“No, thank you.”
She didn’t knock again. But when he stepped out for ice, she’d left a towel folded into a swan on the floor.
Marian had made them once, too. Taught herself from a dated hospitality manual she’d found at Goodwill. “It adds a touch,” she’d said. “It says a person cares.” He didn’t touch it.
The sleep he got was thin—soundless and hopscotched with static.
Once, years ago, he dreamed of her. She stood on the balcony of this room, her hair gathered at the back of her head, smoke curling from her cigarette. She faced him, an unreadable expression. In the dream, she said nothing. Just stood with her back to the rail and watched him, waiting for him to speak.
Now he lay in the dark, occasionally sitting up to listen to the tic of the radiator, like a clock gasping on its own seconds.
He got up and crossed to the window. Strange city. Neon, shiny. A different skyline, but the wind smelled like the same river. He backed away from the glass and turned back into the room.
Sitting on the dresser: a scrap of yellowed paper that hadn’t been there before. Just a few words, handwritten in blue ink:
Don’t forget the stars. I was there too.
His hands trembled. The only picture he had of her grave was a blurry screenshot from a memorial website. He’d taken it drunkenly one night years ago, during a late-night excavation of unloved names from the past. The caption beneath the unadorned, flowerless stone read: “Beloved daughter and sister.”
It skipped what’s usually third on the list. That was when he’d known that one day when there was nothing left to tempt him he’d have to go.
He left before sunrise. Took a cab out to the cemetery. In his breast pocket was the note.
The earth was soft with morning rain. Her name was hewn in the stone, simple. No middle name. No inscription beyond the bare facts of her life.
He crouched—knees creaking—and touched the stone.
“I should have asked,” he said. “I should have stayed. Or left differently. Or… hell, I don’t know.” The words felt thin. But they were true. No script. Just the bones of an old silence being unmade.
“You were broken. And I knew it. But I didn’t understand the shape of your break. I didn’t want to. I told myself love would be enough, and when it wasn’t, I went quiet.”
He exhaled. “And I was broken too. In different ways. I made myself small. I made you smaller. I tried to control what scared me. I tried to survive you instead of love you.”
He wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand.
“You had your battles. And I know how hard you fought. Yours overtook you in the end. Mine didn’t. Not then. Maybe not even now.”
He paused, pressing his palm flat to the stone.
“They say it’s slow growing. I don’t know. Doesn’t feel slow. But I’ve been thinking maybe I can face it because of you. Because I saw what you went through. What you carried. You taught me something I didn’t understand back then—not about winning. About staying. About showing up even when it’s hard.
And I know it broke you in the end. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t leave something behind. You showed me what it looks like to fight even when you’re losing. That’s how I’ve lived all these years.
That’s why I’m not afraid now.”
The wind picked up. Cold, brisk. The clouds moved quickly across a pale sky. He reached into his coat pocket and drew out a small, unopened pack of clove cigarettes. The old kind black paper, gold seal. He’d searched for them that morning. Not out of nostalgia. Out of a need to do the one thing he’d never done, not once, in the thirteen years they were married.
“I never bought these for you,” he said. “Not even once.”
He turned the pack over in his hand.
“You couldn’t quit. And I hated that. Hated the way it made me feel like I was watching you lose, slowly. My father smoked like a chimney. Died young. I carried that into every argument we ever had.”
He crouched and laid the pack at the base of the stone. Pressed it gently into the soft earth.
“But I get it now. Some things you don’t escape. You just learn to live with them. And you tried. God, you tried.”
He sat back on his heels. The damp rose through the knees of his pants.
“This is yours. Finally.”
A breath. Then, quieter:
“I couldn’t give it to you then. But I can now. I thought about lighting it. Just once, for you. But I figured you’d appreciate the gesture more if I didn’t.”
He sat back on his heels and looked up at the sky.
“This belongs to you,” he said. “The scent, the silence, the years I didn’t know what to say.”
He scooped up some loose dirt near the headstone—gently, carefully, as much as his aching hands would allow. Then he laid the cigarettes in the hollow and smoothed the earth over them.
“I remember,” he said. “Even the parts I tried to forget.”
He stood slowly, knees stiff, and lingered a moment longer before turning back toward the road.
He left the cemetery as the sun broke through the clouds. Drove the familiar road, turned off at the exit, and slowed as the spot came into view.
Only—there was nothing. The hotel was gone. In its place stood a multi-tiered parking garage, all steel and concrete and city signage.
He pulled into the lot and parked. No lobby. No elevator. No Room 303.
Across the street was a small coffee shop. He stepped inside and ordered something anything to warm his hands. When the barista handed him his cup, he asked, “Do you know what happened to the hotel that used to be right across the road?”
The young man blinked. “That place? Oh—yeah. It got torn down years ago. Maybe ten? They put in the garage for the light rail. Can’t remember the exact year.”
Charles didn’t respond. Just nodded slowly, looking past the window to where the neon sign should’ve been. He walked the perimeter, weaving between parked cars and steel pylons. Eventually, he found the spot, the place he was certain the room had once been. He laid his hand against the cold concrete wall, as if testing for a heartbeat beneath the surface. Nothing. Just the faint hum of fluorescent light and the ghost of something remembered.
He stood there a moment longer, his hand pressed to the wall, as if listening for some echo that might still be moving through the concrete. The city around him stirred the hiss of bus brakes, a gull’s cry, the jangle of someone’s keys—but none of it touched him.
He didn’t know what the truth was. Only that he’d been given a night he hadn’t expected, and maybe didn’t deserve. And whatever had opened for him—memory, mercy, or something stranger—it had closed again.
Just one more night. *
There are rooms in the world that don’t appear on the reservation ledger. You don’t find them they find you, when the hour is right and the silence deep enough. Room 303 was one such room. A place made not of walls and wallpaper, but of unspoken choices and truths long left behind. For Charles, it was never about forgiveness. It was about memory the kind that never really checks out.
Some places return when they’re needed. Some rooms stay open for just one more night...
Monte Igueldo, 1988
Renee Mies
Renee Mies lives in the Chicago suburbs. She is a Board Certified Patient Advocate and hobby Poetess. Her Poems have appeared in Prosetrics Literary Magazine, Half Way Down the Stairs Literary Magazine and Cathexis Northwest Press. Upcoming works can be seen in The Wild Umbrella, Beyond Words Magazine and Fjords Review. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, camping and keeping up with her husband and four children.
by the Ghosts of Youth and Red Wine
I was eighteen and the cliff didn’t care.
Monte Igueldo leaned into the sky, a quiet skeleton of grandeur above San Sebastián, the funicular crawling up like a secret no one wanted to tell.
The hotel waited— an old lion with velvet teeth and haunted breath, all mirrors and murmurs, chandeliers that blinked like dead stars.
We drank on the balcony, my stepmother and I, two bottles deep in Rioja, laughing like sinners with a view that could unmake God.
That night, the bed spun like a cheap carnival ride in slow motion. I groped toward the bathroom, the walls breathing beside me, floor slipping under barefoot confessions.
A key rattled in the lock. Not mine.
Some Spaniard— slurring curses or apologies pushed at the door that refused him. I stood frozen, drunk, half-born from the dark, watching the knob twitch like it knew how thin the world really is.
Monte Igueldo held its breath. Even the ghosts were polite and let me puke in peace.
Solar Phenomena, 1991
Julie Benesh
Julie Benesh is author of the poetry collection Initial Conditions and the chapbook About Time, has been published in Tin House, Another Chicago Magazine, Florida Review, and other places, earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and received an Illinois Arts Council Grant. She works as a professor, department chair, and management consultant and holds a PhD in human and organizational systems. Solar Phenomena, 1991 first appeared in Typishly.
Cloudy in Kona; obviously, my fault. Up the mountain, down the coast, looking for a break in the overcast to reveal the moonshadow filtering the sun, you cursed and pounded the steering wheel.
We'd planned for over a year; you joined that primitive listserve to trade travel tips. You pointed out the ginger lady you’d met on it when we first arrived; she looked smaller in person than in my mind. Other than that, I don’t remember getting there or getting back home, just the loony note she’d slid under the door of the room we shared, as husband and wife. Shaking, I tore open the envelope and flushed it down the commode before I read the letter I handed to you, back from a run.
True to our forms, you found the white scrap left on the floor; shocked I'd opened your mail: my error as ever eclipsing yours.
Room Service
Katherine Fishburn
Katherine Fishburn writes flash fiction and poetry. Three of her short shorts appear in the Book of 422, where she writes also as Samantha Spade and Cardigan Sweater. She has published poetry in several literary journals, including The Florida Review, enizagam, Snowy Egret, Horn & Ivory, Ginosko and others. A visual artist, she has had several solo shows; her paintings have appeared in MidAmerican Review and online zines. She makes a mean hot and sour soup.
“Good afternoon, Miss—ah, Miss Kkfujes—Miss…” The young man gulped, checking her driver’s license.
“Kfjester,” she replied. “The k and j are silent.”
“Unusual name.”
“Indeed. But then all names had a moment of invention, yes?”
“Moment of invention?”
“Everyone’s name is made up, right? Even yours, uh… Brian. What’s your surname?”
“Uh. Bourne. Brian Bourne.”
“So, Brian from-the-brook. I bet your ancestors lived by a stream in jolly old England.”
“They did?”
“Just speculating. But here most names have nothing to do with the surrounding landscape.”
“No?”
“That’s right. For example, where do you live?”
“Uh, Lake of the Woods. Apartment complex on the north side of town.”
“Any lake or woods nearby?”
“Not that I know of.”
“See what I mean?”
What was with this woman anyway? She sounded like a professor or something. But in his experience, she sure didn’t look like one. She had legs long enough to wrap around him twice. Big tits and a smile she kept flashing, almost nervously. She was a puzzle.
“Beg pardon?” She must have been talking while he was mind-fucking her.
“You know what I saw while driving here from the airport?”
“No, Ma’am.”
“Another apartment complex. ‘Stonehedge.’”
“My grandmother lives there.” Well, duh. BFD. Where was his game, dammit?
“Yeah? Well, the developer named it after Stonehenge, the prehistoric monument on the Salisbury Plain in southern England. But he misspelled it.”
“He did?”
“Oh, never mind, honey. Just run my credit card, will you? I’ve got to crash. Big meeting tomorrow.” God, she needed a drink. “Minibar stocked in my suite?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said smartly.
“Extra gin?”
“I can arrange that.”
She knew it was probably a bad idea to get sloshed the night before her pitch to MDOT, but she was already strung out with exhaustion. And boredom. God, she hated her job. Selling reflective paint to state road commissions. This year’s best-seller so far had been Yellow Fever Hoppedup Jungle couldn’t beat it for reflectivity.
“What? Oh, my signature.” She looked directly at him. Not bad. Maybe she wasn’t so tired after all. “What year are you?” That smile again.
“Senior come late August.” He felt himself getting hard, glad that the counter blocked her view. Maybe he hadn’t seemed too much like a dork, after all. This summer job had more perks than any other he’d had before. He’d already met some hot chicks. One had surprised him when she pulled him into her room wearing a blue Teddy but no hair. Her wig was hanging over a lampshade by the bed. He’d never fucked a bald woman
before. But she hung on to him like a cat on a drape. Then there was the woman who had a prosthetic leg. Best head of his life. That stump of hers pumped his shoulder until it ached. She had left a huge contusion just above his clavicle, but it had been worth it. He wondered what flaw was hidden behind this one’s apparent perfection. He couldn’t wait to find out.
*
“You. Sit there.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Not that chair. This one.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“That’s better. And stop calling me ‘Ma’am.’ Every time you do that, I age ten years. Get my drift.”
“Yes, I ”
“You don’t have a clue, do you?”
“No, Ma—I mean. No. No, I don’t. I don’t have a clue.”
“Doesn’t matter. Forget it.”
Two minutes with this crazy woman and she was already trying to scare the bejesus out of him. Sure was bossy. She’d be a challenge for sure. He was looking forward to it.
“I was thinking that we ought to set some ground rules, right up front. What do you say?”
“Sure.” What was this all about? He’d been hoping for a quick in and out. But maybe she had something kinky in mind. Was she into S&M or what? Maybe she wanted a safe word. Bet that was it. Or… maybe he’d need one. Could be interesting. Something to tell the guys. If it didn’t make him look bad. He squirmed nervously, jiggling his leg. Wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to be on the receiving end if it got dicey.
“Cut out that goddamned jiggling. Drives me nuts. When my father got nervous in front of my boyfriends, he used to jiggle the change in his pocket. Used to give me a stomachache. Always thought that he was signaling a threat in some kind of code, currency code or coin code. Code code. Whatever. Whether he was warning me off the guy or the guy off me never could tell. Embarrassed me too. So don’t you go reminding me of my father. You hear me?”
“S-sorry. I’ll stop.”
“Right. I thought maybe we ought to get to know one another, just a bit. To see if we have anything else in common. Deal?”
“Deal.” He wondered what the else was. And were they going to fuck or just shoot the bull. He hoped he hadn’t misjudged her. Hadn’t he read somewhere about a ‘zipless fuck’? That’s what he was after. No emotional entanglements. But he wasn’t about to walk. Not yet anyway. She was hot and knew it, too. He’d stick around and see what she had in mind. Every time she spoke to him, she looked him straight in the eyes and held his gaze. It was both deeply terrifying and surprisingly arousing. She was on some sort of power trip, he was sure of it. And what was that bit about her father? What did that mean? It had thrown him off his own game. But like the other women, she too would have a flaw that would spice things up as they sparred in what he was hoping was her version of sexual foreplay. Vocal foreplay. Her version of oral sex. God, he hoped not.
“Here’s the drill. We ask each other a series of questions. We’ll take turns. You can go first. But you need to know straight off that I don’t have time to listen to music or watch movies online or in theaters. I’m a techie but I’m not up to date on slang. I hate rap. Too misogynistic. Have very mixed feelings about country. And have attended only one opera in my life so that’s a non-starter. Capisce?”
“Huh?”
“Brian. Brian. Brian.” She shook her head in mock disappointment. “I went first, and you failed the first question. Naughty boy.” She laughed but not unkindly. “Listen up. ‘Cause there’s going to be an exit quiz.”
“There is?” Was she serious? Wonder what she had in mind. And how did she mean exit?
“Capisce.” She repeated, pronouncing it with a strong accent, putting thumb and forefinger together in front of her lips. “Italian for ‘understand’. As in, do you understand what I just said? Catch my drift? Got it?”
“Got what?”
“Boy, didn’t they teach you anything at the big U?”
Oh, crap. He blushed. He’d have to do better than this. Figure out her game. Be a worthy opponent.
“Let’s start over, shall we? Here’s an easy one. Ready? Who won the Revolutionary War?”
“Oh, I know that one. England.”
Holy Mother of Jesus. And he was going to graduate?
“We did, Brian. We did. We beat the British. The War of Independence.”
“Right. Right. Now I remember.”
“You’re just going to have to wait for your turn to ask me something. I need to suss things out first. How about this one: what are the three branches of government?”
“Uh. There’s the president and,” he paused. “The Senate and the House of Representatives.”
“Wipe that smug grin off your face, sonny boy. You left out the Judicial Branch.”
“But you said three.” He was catching on but she didn’t have a clue. He smiled innocently.
Dear god in heaven-knows-where they get undergraduates these days.
“Congress, Brian. The Senate and the House constitute congress, the second branch.”
Was there no hope for this citizen? Or the country for that matter. She shuddered, thinking of the future when his generation ran the government. Would Social Security survive its ineptitude? Would they even be employable themselves? Wonder if he even knows congress also means coitus. Nah. Not a chance.
“Since merry old England has come up in our conversation already, I’ll ask you how the Brits spell jail.”
Wha? This must be a trick question.
“Uh. J-a-i-l?”
“No no no. It’s gaol. That’s g-a-o-l. And the hood of a car is a bonnet.”
“Thought that was some sort of girl’s hat with a wide brim.” He laughed. He’d learned three things from her already. Was eager for more of her questions.
“Let’s try another topic. This is probably more up your alley. Who said: ‘Go ahead, make my day’?”
“That’s easy. Clint Eastwood!” He knew he couldn’t fake this one. Everybody knew this line. “In Dirty Harry,” he added.
“Sudden Impact,” she corrected. She watched him deflate. “But, in all fairness. I didn’t ask for the name of the film. So, I’ll give you that one. You’re right. It was Eastwood playing Harry Callahan. And since you’re such an Eastwood fan, I’ll give you a chance on another. How does Gran Torino end?”
“Uh.” He scratched his head, stumped. He could never remember the dénouement of this film. Always got it confused with another Eastwood plot.
“Take it as a mulligan.”
“I know what a mulligan is,” he blurted out, laughing again.
“I’m sure you do.” She was quick.
“Don’t I get to ask you any questions?”
“Shoot.” How apt, she thought. “Go for it.”
“Okay. Okay. Who played Johnny Cash in Walk the Line?”
“That the best you got, mister? Joaquin Phoenix. I should really ask you how to spell Joaquin. Ah… Joaquin Phoenix. What a heartthrob. I would have fucked him in a minute. God, was he sexy. You know he sang all those Cash songs himself? What a turn-on. When he bent over that mic and rumbled out the first syllables of ‘I Walk the Line,’ I thought I’d wet my panties. If I had been wearing any, that is. Whew! Getting hot just thinking about that man. Down girl. Down. Need some ice there,” as she pointed suggestively between her legs.
Taking her literally, he grabbed the courtesy bucket and ran down the hall. What in hell was taking him so long?
He used his tight little butt to open the door that he’d left ajar.
“Knock knock! Room Service.” He said loudly. “Two ice cold beers and a bucket of ice for Miss Fester.” He grinned.
“Well. My lordy. An officer and a gentleman.”
He looked bewildered.
“Richard Gere? Debra Winger?”
More blank looks. He really didn’t know this one. Shrugged at his own cluelessness. He was shameless.
“Got me on that one.”
“Never mind. Thanks for the ice, honey. But I’ll pass on the beers. They make me burp,” she giggled. “I’m a gut-stomping, gin-drinking woman myself.”
Now he looked distressed. Poor kid. But she couldn’t help it. She just didn’t like beer.
“Hey. It doesn’t matter. Drink ’em both. You’re probably parched after this grilling.”
She put some ice in the plastic tumbler, briefly put it between her legs and sighed with pleasure. Then took a teeny-weeny gin bottle out of the mini bar and poured it. Who needed tonic water? The gin wasn’t great but, hey, what can you expect on the road. She really ought to start packing her own bottle of Rangpur. Now that gin she could drink straight day or night if it had been stored in the freezer. Hendrix, too. But she preferred the hint of lime in Rangpur to the cucumber in Hendrix. Cripes, you sound like a sommelier, girl. Hint of lime. Get real. She wanted the real thing.
“Don’t happen to have any limes, do you? No, of course not.”
“I could ”
“Now where were we? Oh, yes. The movies.” As she slugged down the gin, she evaluated his hardon. Must be getting pretty damned painful by now, she surmised, throbbing too. Maybe it was time to give him a break. Nah. She’d let him suffer awhile longer. “Hell, I’m tired of movies. You too, I bet. Ask me another question.”
“What number-one song on the charts is Lil Nas X known for?” He just couldn’t resist.
“Brian. Brian. Brian. I told you, no rap. I hate rap music.”
“Right. Um…” He scratched his head, running his fingers through a thick shock of dark brown hair. She noted the size of that hand. Definitely he was going to be worth waiting for. She could get a good hold on that hair, too. Just the right length. Not too short. And thank god, not long and stringy. She hated long hair in men.
“Okay. Try this. Who recorded ‘How Do You Like Me now’?”
“Toby Keith. And I told you, Brian. I’m not crazy about country either. Try again.”
In fact, to her surprise, she had found herself warming up to him. He was good-looking and good-humored. She was embarrassing him to shit and
he was actually laughing about it. She had a hunch that he was a whole lot smarter than she had originally thought. And was pretty sure he had picked the Toby Keith song because he really wanted to know. This was fun. He was fun. It had been a long time since she had had this much fun. By now she had a buzz on to match his hardon. Maybe it was time to let him shine. She stood up, grabbed the top of his jeans and pulled him onto the bed.
“Let’s see what you’ve got in here, shall we?”
He groaned as she pulled out his cock.
“Oh, Brian. Brian. Brian. Good boy, Brian!” And she started licking his cock.
Well, now this version of oral sex was just what he had hoped for.
“Your turn,” he said.
My god that felt good.
She caught her breath just long enough to suggest: “Oh, Brian,” she said casually.
“H’m?”
“Suck my shoulder, will you?”
Odd. But if that was what the lady wanted, who was he to deny her?
“What the hell ”
“Oh, didn’t I tell you? I’ve got two. Go on now, be a good boy.”
Holy shit! Never seen anything like that before. Criminy she was coming so wildly he could hardly keep her on the bed. It took all his will power not to come himself during her turbulence.
Finally, she pulled him off her shoulder by his hair, panting, “Now, Brian, now. Fuck me now. Ooooh . . . yes yes yes. More more. Don’t stop.”
As he pumped and she quivered in pleasure, she used one of her powerful long legs to flip them both over so she was on top.
“Just wait, honey. Hang on.”
OMG! She was so wet and coming like no one he had ever fucked before. She was a fucking fucking-machine.
He used his arm to flip them back so he could be on top again. Not yet. Not yet. Gotta make this last as long as possible.
As he thrust himself deeper inside, she thought to ask him one more question.
“Hey, Brian. What’s a prime number?”
“Who the fuck cares?” He bellowed as with one mighty groan he came with the power and intensity of youth. They decoupled and lay panting in the damp sheets. She needed a break. He wanted more. They both were laughing hysterically.
*
She had to give him credit. Full marks. He certainly did know how to fuck. He couldn’t match her orgasm for orgasm, but he was giving it the old college try. How many times had it been? She’d lost count. She had forgotten what it was like to fuck a twenty-year-old. He was ready for more, but she was whipped. Had to get a couple hours of sleep or she’d bomb at the meeting. Thank god she had eaten before she checked in or she’d be starving by now.
She shoved him toward the door.
“Say three Hail Marys and call me in the morning, will you, sweetheart? At 6 a.m. Sharp. Nice chatting with you.”
He started to let himself out, when she added, “You knew the answers all along, didn’t you, cowboy?”
“Who, me?”
Holy shit! He’d never met anyone like her before. Talk about a mind-fuck, he thought, as he shut the door behind him, grinning. Thank god for all those electives. And, yeah, he knew all the answers, including how to define a prime number. Including Mersenne’s formula for generating them. He was no slouch potato.
Inside the room, she smiled to herself. Completely satisfied. He had fooled her at first. Playing to her raging ego, her weakness. Her fatal flaw. She always had to be the smartest one in class. Or at work. Or on a date.
But she had eventually cottoned onto the fact that he wasn’t as stupid as he put on. He had game all right. She’d have to think of another competition for tomorrow night’s entertainment. She could do that with no trouble at all while she was shilling Yellow Fever Hopped-up Jungle. Oh, crap, there goes that ego of hers again. Bah, who cares. She did have a gift—besides that of being capable of multiple orgasms, she was terrific at multitasking. Hot damn. She couldn’t wait. Just thinking about Brian fromthe-brook made her wet all over again. Room service, indeed.
The Buena Vista Inn
Ann Liska
Ann Liska's work has been published in several on-line and print journals. Ann did once refuse to stay in a hotel she found creepy, but all the rest is made up - and she now thinks they should have stayed there, for research purposes.
They had an argument yesterday and Marissa wanted to cancel the trip, but Larry insisted.
He knew it seemed odd. They lead mostly separate lives now.
The weather wasn’t cooperating either. A snowstorm had begun in the night and was predicted to become worse all day.
“I don’t know what your father is thinking,” Marissa had sniffed to their daughter on the phone. “We haven’t gone anywhere together in years.”
“Maybe he just wants to do something nice,” Nancy suggested. “You never get out of the house anymore.”
“Don’t worry, it’ll be fine,” Larry said as he pulled the car out. “Just relax.” Marissa pulled her coat around her and fell asleep.
*
The car is a 4X4, old but well maintained. Larry listens to the radio, Sinatra. Marissa doesn’t stir until they leave the freeway an hour later.
“Where are we?” she asks.
“Almost there, I think.” It’s dangerous to take his eyes off the road. The freeway had been slushy, salt trucks ahead of him. Now on the county road, the ABS brakes kick in at every stop. Larry turns on the defrosters front and back, reaches his bare hand out to remove ice from the side mirror. He hates Marissa’s ridiculous oversized, overpriced vehicle, but now he thinks they should have taken it instead. It has heated mirrors.
He glances at Marissa to try and gauge her mood. “Turn on the GPS, ok?”
The bossy GPS lady dictates where to turn right, turn left, make a U turn. It’s nearly dark. They pass the sign with the town’s name on it, and a short main street, but no hotels. On the right is one of those new fake downtowns so popular now, with shops, restaurants, even a sort of town square with a clock tower. These places are being built on the theory that they’re safer than malls. More open.
“Maybe that’s it,” Marissa says, but the GPS lady tells them to turn left.
The turn takes them into an industrial park area: FedEx, light manufacturing. “These directions must be wrong,” Larry says. “We’ll have to stop and ask.”
“Ask who?” Marissa snaps. There is nobody around.
Larry doesn’t answer. They turn a corner, and the Buena Vista Inn is there, next to a self-storage place. A backhoe sits near the parking lot, where some of the cars are covered with ice and snow, looking like they haven’t moved for months.
There’s a big atrium lobby, well-lit, facing the nearly empty parking lot and the U-Store-It.
“We should have stayed home,” Marissa says. “Well, we’re here now,” Larry says. He doesn’t like the look of the place either. The web site didn’t show its location, only the nice lobby and a few shots of the rooms, which all feature indoor plunge pools. The reviews were good, too, although maybe those were manipulated.
Marissa folds her arms. “I’m not going in there,” she tells her husband.
“You see the weather, Marissa. I’m tired. I’m not driving back tonight.” Larry drives up to drop her off at the entrance. He gets out, opens her door. Marissa sighs and exits the car, giving him a dirty look.
Larry retrieves his gray duffle bag and Marissa’s two floral print suitcases from the trunk. He could easily carry this luggage, but he hands it over to the waiting bellhop, not wanting to deprive the man of his tip. Larry is a tall man, has always thought of himself as a tall man, but this guy, dressed in all black, towers over him.
At the front desk, one couple is ahead of them, holding hands.
“I’m so excited to stay here,” the woman says to Marissa. “I’ve heard it’s fabulous.”
Marissa, never one for small talk, gives the woman a tight smile.
Larry tries to remember the last time he held Marissa’s hand.
“Remember that hotel in Montreal, when we were there with the Ski Club?” he asks his wife.
“That was ages ago.”
“Yes, but remember it? There was an indoor-outdoor pool. You swam outside and got icicles in your hair, but you said you weren’t cold.”
Marissa shivers like a dog shaking out its wet fur, and smiles.
“That was nice,” she says.
“Your Vista isn’t very Buena,” Larry says to the desk clerk, who fixes him with a dull stare. She has a mouth that turns downward by itself, like that Greta woman on TV.
“You know, Buena means good,” he tries again. “The view…”
“Here’s your room key. Elevator’s down the hall.” And the woman turns away.
“The room’s ok,” Marissa says, looking around. “Big. And a pool? Really?”
“I thought you might like it,” he says. He doesn’t want to fight here, when he’s tired and there’s no place to escape. “We’ll just stay the one night, if you want.”
“We’ll see,” she says, and pulls aside the curtain to reveal nothing but the wall.
“No windows?“
“Let’s make the best of it. We’ll go to dinner,” he says. The bellhop arrives with their luggage.
“Is everything satisfactory, sir?”
“It’s fine,” Larry says, handing over the tip. “Where can we eat?”
“The staff will bring you anything you need, sir. We have arrangements with all the best restaurants in town. Just tell us what you’d like. Shall I fill your ice bucket?”
“Ice – sure, thanks. But we’d like to go out to eat.”
“Ah – very well, sir. It’s a bit of a drive –“
“That’s all right. I’ll get directions at the front desk.”
“Yes, sir. Though usually our guests prefer to stay in.”
Greta, at the front desk, says she doesn’t know where any restaurants are.
“How can that be? It’s a small town. And the guy just said they have arrangements with all the restaurants,” Marissa says as they get back in the car.
“She’s not very friendly,” Larry comments.
The GPS lady directs them back to the fake downtown. Larry passes a Best Buy and a Joanne’s and pulls up outside a steakhouse. “What about this place?” he says, and Marissa grunts.
They talk about the kids and grandkids, the only safe subjects in recent years. Work: Marissa thinks he’s doing something for the Government. Money: better not. Sex: avoid at all costs.
There is also health, but Larry hates that. Their health is ok, actually, for their ages, but Marissa doesn’t think so. Has never thought so, even when young. The form of communication that comes naturally to her is complaint. But Larry will no longer listen.
Food does cheer her up a little. The steaks are good. For once, she hasn’t fussed at him for having a cocktail. He looks out the window at the storm and stops himself from ordering another. He’ll have it later.
After dinner he looks at the inviting plunge pool. The room is warm. “How about a swim?” he asks.
Marissa yawns and says, “I didn’t bring my suit. I’m going to bed.” It’s 8:30 p.m.
“It’s just us, Marissa,” he says.
She takes her sleeping pill – the reason she can’t drink, not that she would – and straps her CPAP mask onto her face, making her look like some sort of space alien. In twenty minutes, she’s asleep. Larry waits a few minutes more and then slips out.
He needs to call Elena, and to get more ice. He starts looking in the logical places but can’t locate an ice machine. Suddenly he’s face to face with the bellhop from earlier. He is very young, but pasty-faced and slightly stooped. Maybe he has that syndrome, Marfan’s, like Lincoln did.
“I told you, sir. We will bring you anything you need.”
“I’m perfectly capable of filling an ice bucket,” Larry says.
Without another word, the guy takes the container and walks away.
He doesn’t call Elena, since there is no place quiet to do so. He has a quick, nude swim, thinking of her. He makes a double gin & tonic. Adds a curl of lime peel he’s brought in a Ziploc bag.
Elena: he thinks of her constantly. He had never planned on cheating. Once in a while, a student would flirt with him. He knew better than to respond. Then one day, Elena showed up in his database class. She approached the podium where he was organizing his notes.
“I’m Elena Fox,” she said. “I work over at the U-D outreach branch. My boss assigned me to audit this class. We’re doing a big software implementation, and he thinks this will help me with the project.”
“I noticed your name on the roster. So, you’re from the competition, are you?”
“Yes, but I don’t have anything to do with the recruitment part. I’m the functional tech specialist for the Registrar’s Office.”
“It will be good to have a funky tech in the class,” Larry said.
“Yeah, most of us are hard-core nerds,” the mouthy kid in the second row put in.
“But you’re auditing, Ms. Fox. Why not try for an ‘A’ instead?” Larry asked.
“Call me Elena,” she said. “And I’d love to get an ‘A’, and I could, too, except that I’ll be missing a few classes. We work late a lot.”
Larry had been teaching for a long time by then. He had encountered all kinds of students. But this woman flustered him. She wasn’t just beautiful. She seemed to glow. He felt himself blushing, of all things.
Usually, he walked around the room when he lectured, drawing diagrams on the whiteboard, sometimes moving up and down the rows of students to see who was paying attention. But that day he stood behind the podium, stiff and unnatural.
As the weeks went by, he felt more comfortable around Elena. Sometimes they chatted for a few minutes before class. Elena was always the first one there. He learned that she had two kids, and that her husband worked at an accounting firm.
“I’m enjoying the class,” she told him. “Maybe I should go back to school, get my master’s.”
“With two kids?” Larry queried, knowing he was overstepping a boundary. But talking to Elena came so naturally.
She smiled and said, “I can do anything I decide to do. You’d be surprised.”
His imagination ran wild, as it often did whenever he thought of this woman. At night he scrunched himself into a corner of the king-size bed he shared with Marissa, hiding his erections from her. Sometimes she noticed and said, ‘We can do it if you want.” Then he would climb on top of his wife and get it over with as soon as possible.
One day he asked Elena to have dinner with him. After all, he rationalized, Elena wasn’t a real student. She was thirty-nine years old and, like him, long married. Larry felt an irrational jealousy toward a man he had never met.
At dinner they talked about their lives. Elena’s big project was a good conversation starter.
“Too bad I can’t help. Conflict of interest,” Larry commented. “I’ve done lots of software projects, free-lance.”
“I wish,” Elena replied. “We have a consulting firm in now, and they’re worthless. They fly in every Monday, dump some spreadsheets on us, assign a ton of work and then leave. They’re billing us at a crazy rate, and I can’t see the value added.”
They talked on about consultants, software and craziness in the workplace. Larry was charmed by Elena’s sharp mind almost as much as by her sexy body, which he wished he could see naked.
Elena didn’t say much about her marriage, but Larry began to realize that she was very unhappy. She was the breadwinner, but her husband, Elliott, made the decisions. Elena was exhausted from work, the kids, and keeping house. She admitted that she had no talent for the latter, and that she was not a good cook.
“Elliott does do the cooking and most of the grocery shopping, but he harps at me about things. Every little thing, and he yells at the boys a lot, and sometimes I just feel helpless to intervene,” Elena said. “His own mother asked him why he’s mean to me and the boys, and he said he didn’t know.”
She could have been describing Larry’s own life. He had accepted his unhappiness a long time ago. He was married to a difficult woman, the kind referred to as ‘high maintenance.’ Until he met Elena, this had never really bothered him. He didn’t mind the way Marissa bossed him around, threw tantrums over minor incidents, acted helpless when he knows damn well she isn’t.
After dinner, Elena put her hand on his shoulder and said, “Thanks for dinner. I enjoyed it a lot.”
He wanted to grab her then, kiss her the way he had never in his life kissed Marissa. He wanted to make love to Elena then and there. But he thanked her and left. All night he thought about her, just that hand on his shoulder.
It took a while before the opportunity to be alone with Elena presented itself in the form of a conference.
“Conference sex, how cliché,” Elena said.
Larry gave her a look and she laughed. “Just kidding. You’re my first. And my last,” she said. With that, she pushed him down on the bed.
For the first time Larry, at fifty-five years of age, knew what “good in bed” meant. Elena was loving, tender, but also fierce. She liked to be on top. She suggested positions he’d thought were mythological. Before Elena he had never given or received oral sex. But if it were just sex, they could have stopped once their curiosity was sated.
Now he fixes himself another Gin and Tonic, curl of lime. He looks at Marissa, asleep on her back with the CPAP mask obscuring her face. He thinks that if she would lose some weight, maybe she wouldn’t need the machine, but Marissa isn’t interested in losing weight, or exercising, or a proper diet. She must weigh over two hundred pounds by now. Larry pictures her large breasts, sagging nearly to her waist when they’re not confined in the heavy-duty brassiere she wears. He remembers her on their honeymoon, sturdy but only a size fourteen, wearing sexy undergarments.
Back then, they had both tried. He was thirty years old and gainfully employed, of a similar ethnic background, the same religion. His mother pushed him to give Marissa a ring for Christmas, and after that the whole wedding machine kicked into gear. They were married in the dead of winter, which he now thinks was a sort of omen. Marissa quit her job. She got pregnant with Nancy on their honeymoon. He was overjoyed to have a child on whom he could lavish the love his wife wouldn’t accept. They had two more kids, boys, and Larry found his life tolerable when he could
be with his kids, driving them to school, doing sports with them, helping with homework (Nancy was the smartest. The boys lagged behind in math and science, a thing he couldn’t understand.) Meanwhile, Marissa stayed home and got fat.
He hasn’t seen his wife naked in a long time. They haven’t had sex since his first time with Elena. Marissa had been suspicious at first, but at this point he thinks she’s just relieved.
His plan now seems absurd. Dragging Marissa’s inert body will be nearly impossible, and what if she wakes up? He imagines his wife’s terrified eyes, a struggle in the deep water, maybe both of them drowning, or worse, both of them surviving with her knowing.
He promised before the God he no longer believes in to love, honor and cherish this woman until death did them part. A natural death. And a promise is a promise, after all.
Larry gets into bed beside Marissa, who doesn’t stir. He is sleepless, overtired, too much alcohol and emotional exhaustion.
He hears some odd noises, like muffled screams, and imagines couples like him and Elena having fun in the plunge pools.
He drifts off to sleep eventually, thinking, I never meant everything to turn out like this.
He’s up at 5:30, which is when he usually goes for his swim anyway. He swims thirty laps, takes a long shower and leaves the room. Marissa is still in bed, either asleep or pretending to be.
“Morning, Greta,” he says to the front-desk woman.
“My name’s not Greta.”
“Well, what is your name? You guys should wear name tags.”
She turns away without answering. Can’t a person have that fixed, he wonders – a face like that, incapable of smiling.
He’s come downstairs without his coat and doesn’t like the idea of returning for it. Maybe Marissa will be awake and start an argument. He goes out in only his exercise pants and a sweater, hair still wet from the shower. The parking lot is encrusted in ice-covered snow, which he crunches through. The ground floor, apart from the atrium, appears to be only garages.
One of the backhoes is out and loading something. The driver glances at Larry but doesn’t speak. The garage door slams down as Larry walks by.
He craves more exercise – thirty laps of a tiny pool is nothing – but there’s nowhere to walk. He is cold and it’s dangerous without proper footwear, so Larry goes back inside after circling the hotel just once.
“What’s on the rest of the ground floor?” he asks Greta, wondering if she ever goes off duty.
“Sir,” she replies, “Most people are not as curious as you.”
Marissa is up and eating a big room-service breakfast.
“We can go back today,” he says. “I’m sorry about this, it was a mistake.”
He is always apologizing, he thinks. She never does – never has, that he can recall, not once in all these years.
He’s expecting her to unleash a tirade, but she only says, “Yes, let’s go home.”
When they go downstairs to check out, they are the only couple in line. Marissa comments on it as they start back.
“Mmm. Maybe the spouses were packing their stuff, or sleeping in,” he says. “It doesn’t look like a place you would go to by yourself.”
“Not a place you would go to, period!” his wife says, and she barks a rare laugh.
He laughs too.
At home Marissa turns on the TV and falls into her Barcalounger with a grunt. Larry takes Trixie’s leash in hand. He calls the dog sitter and tells her not to come tonight, he’ll pay her for the weekend anyway. Trixie is running in circles, overjoyed. He leashes the dog.
He walks to the end of the block, punches in Elena’s number.
“I wasn’t expecting to hear from you yet,” she says.
“Ah, we’re back. The place was awful. Wait until I tell you.”
But when they see each other, as usual, he holds back part of the story. They laugh together about the weird staff, the lack of ambience and windows. He doesn’t tell her the real reason he took his wife to the Buena Vista Inn, or the thing he didn’t do.
Room for Memory
Isaac Humphrey
Isaac Humphrey (they/he) is a recovering academic. A native of South Carolina, they’ve spent years flitting from state to state in search of the great unknown Something. They haven’t found it yet, but they’ve collected quite a few ghost stories, bad habits, and oddly specific theories about loneliness along the way.
Every Wednesday, for the past six months, they’ve had a routine. Room 114 at the Blue Moon Inn. A beige two-story motel off the freeway that looks like a melting sheet cake. The parking lot is usually half full, sometimes less but never more. The clerk stopped asking questions early on. She’s worked there long enough to know. Or, rather, not care.
The room has one good lamp, two bad paintings of the ocean, and a buzzing A/C unit that ticks like a heart murmur.
Trevor brings a duffel bag. Always the same one. Always the same contents. Clothes, toothbrush, charger, cologne, and—ritualistically folded—a single clean towel.
The motel towels are thin and stiff, fraying at the edges like they want to come undone. The clean towel is something softer. Something familiar. Something his.
Not many things are. Not really. Not his name. Not his body. Not his past. Not even his age. He’s twenty-six but usually younger. Whatever the men are looking for. Extravagant dinners or parties with Trevor on their arms. Cleaned up. Polished. Tucked inside a brand new suit. Given a name just a bit more sophisticated. Declan. James. Sebastian. Even Amelia. Usually the sex isn’t the main part but it always ends there. Sometimes it’s even good. Sometimes they don’t hit him.
But that’s work.
Tonight isn’t.
Tonight is different. Wednesdays are always different.
At 6 PM a man will knock on the door. Not a client. Not a friend either, not exactly. A man with graying temples and sad eyes.
They don’t fuck. They don’t even undress much. Just shoes off, sometimes socks. Whatever’s comfortable.
Sometimes they nap, sometimes they share takeout, sometimes they sit side by side on the bed with their arms just barely touching. It’s like grazing the edge of a dream. Mostly, though, they talk. Real talk.
Trevor doesn’t know how it started, exactly. An escort gig turned sideways, maybe. A john who’d changed his mind. It’s hard to say now. But after that first Wednesday, it kept happening. Like clockwork. And he lets it. He welcomes it.
*
The light outside the motel is the color of old bones. Trevor showers with the curtain half open, dries off with his towel, and sits on the edge of the bed.
6 o’clock comes and goes.
He checks his phone. No texts.
6:06. Still nothing.
By 6:17 he gets antsy. He stands by the window and peeks between the curtains. Nothing on this side of the parking lot but oily puddles, a beatup sedan, and a couple trucks with the road crews.
At 6:48, his phone buzzes.
Unknown Number: Sorry I’m late. Got caught up with something. You’re still in the room, right?
Yeah, he replies. Everything okay?
Three dots appear, then vanish.
I’m good. Be there in five.
Trevor lays back on the bed, trying to still the strange hum in his chest. Relief, probably. Or anxiety misfiled as hope.
A knock comes at 6:53. He opens the door.
No one is there.
He steps out onto the damp pavement. A cold breeze wraps around him. He glances to his left. Then his right. Closed doors and the glows of vending machines, uninterrupted.
His phone buzzes again.
You left the chain lock on.
But he hadn’t.
Trevor goes back inside and checks. It’s broken, hanging limply off the far door frame by one tiny screw. Mangled, as if the door had been kicked in recently.
He couldn’t have even locked it if he’d wanted to.
He types, hands trembling now.
Are you outside?
No answer.
The room suddenly feels too small. Like the walls are leaning in, trying to hear his thoughts. He sits on the edge of the bed and stares at the stained chair in the corner—the one with the fabric worn down from where the man always sits, leaning forward, elbows on knees, telling stories that never actually started and never really ended.
Did you get a new towel, came the next text.
He stares at the screen. Something prickles under his skin.
Trevor goes into the bathroom and looks at the towel behind the door. Dark gray. Soft. And, yes. New. He’d lost his old one sometime last week. An occupational causality. No big deal.
Who is this? He types.
Dots but no reply.
He stands up. Paces. Thinks about calling the desk, but what would he say? “Someone’s pretending to be someone I might’ve imagined”?
He tries the number. It rings three times. Then someone answers.
Breathing. Just that.
Steady. Familiar.
“Is this a joke?” he asks. It is close to Halloween, though in the wrong direction.
Nothing. Just a low exhale, like wind over a bottle.
And then, faintly, “I miss Wednesdays.”
A lament, like someone remembering the shape of their own shadow.
*
Trevor doesn’t leave the room. He can’t.
He curls up in the corner of the bed with the towel pressed to his face, trying to breath through it. It still smells like detergent and skin. It’s different, but it still smells like him.
It still smells like me, he wants to say. Wants to hold it out. Here. See? It does.
The room is cold but he doesn't touch the thermostat.
The cold helps.
The cold is real.
At some point he must doze off because he wakes to a knock at the door. 2:21 AM.
He stays frozen. Waits.
Another knock. Three times, slow. Like punctuation.
He creeps to the peephole. Nothing. No one. Just the shadow of the railing. He leaves the motel the next morning. He doesn’t take the towel. Doesn’t check out. Just walks out to the bus stop with his duffle bags slung over his shoulder.
For the rest of the week he tries to forget. Works a few jobs. Sleeps in another rental. Keeps his phone turned off. But he can’t get the sound of the man’s voice out of his head.
Had it been real? Had any of it?
There was never a name. Never a number saved. Only Wednesdays. Only the room. Only the time.
He goes back the following week.
Room 114 looks the same. The keycard still works.
The thermostat is still set to the same number. The chair is still positioned slightly to the left. The chain lock is still broken. But there is something on the bed.
A towel. Folded.
Not the motel’s.
His.
Trevor sits down slowly, staring at it. It smells like him. Like last week.
His phone vibrates in his pocket. A message: The room remembers.
Don’t you?
He grips the towel tighter. It had seemed so soft once but, now, so thin. So worn.
It feels like grief. Like the aching shape of an absence that has grown claws. And he doesn’t know how else to mourn it other than to let the claws dig in.
And so he stays.
He sleeps with the towel beside him.
He dreams of hands he can’t see, of voices behind walls, of memories that loop and repeat until they unravel.
When he wakes, there is food on the small table by the window. Takeout from the place they always order from. Still warm.
He doesn’t ask questions after that. Just shows up every Wednesday, same time.
The towel is always there.
Sometimes, so is the food.
And once, just once, he hears the sound of the shower running behind the bathroom door.
But when he opens it, the room is empty.
Steam clings to the mirror. On it, a single word traced in condensation: Stay. * Weeks pass. Maybe months.
The motel stops charging him. No one at the front desk ever looks at him twice. He stops seeing clients. Stops seeing friends. Stops answering texts. The duffel bag stays packed, but he no longer carries it with the urgency of someone ready to leave.
He isn't sure what he is anymore. A man. A ghost. A scent of cologne the room refuses to let fade.
He begins to write things down. What he remembers. What he imagines. Snippets of conversations. The way the man’s thumb brushed his wrist once, gently, like an apology. Or the way he assigned a last name, one that seemed to fit the man as snugly as a wedding band, only to realize the man had never even shared his first.
He thinks if he wrote it all down, the room would stop trying to do it for him.
But the room is stubborn.
One Wednesday, he finds a towel on the bed.
His old one. The one he’d thought he’d never see again. Bone white.
Soft. Still damp, like it has just been used.
And on the pillow, the faint indentation of a head.
He crawls into bed and lays down, mirroring the shape beside him.
The air smells like someone had just exhaled.
The A/C ticks. A car starts. The ghost of a hand brushes his hair.
He squeezes his eyes shut.
The echo of a gun fires through the room.
“I remember,” he whispers.
An Unexpected Stop in Sochi
Mandy Fessenden Brauer
Mandy Fessenden Brauer is a retired child psychologist living between Egypt and Indonesia, who has finally found the time to write. Most of her creative writing is to help kids understand themselves and their world better, and she has had several bibliotherapy books in English and Arabic published to help kids deal with issues like pediatric cancer and various disabilities. Being an octogenarian, she also writes reams of poetry that mainly remains inside her computer.
Sometimes the unexpected which seems dreadful at the time, turns out to be one of the most wonderful memories, the sort to pull out when the conversation turns endlessly dull. Such was our unexpected stay in Sochi which is a lovely resort city on the Black Sea. My husband had taken a job in Yerevan, Armenia just a few years after that landlocked nation had been surprised to find itself independent from the Soviet Union, and we were flying out. Since the nation was fighting a war of aggression with Azerbaijan, we seldom had any gas, electricity or way to cook or keep warm, so we were really looking forward to a much-needed vacation.
The plane swooped down and had an unscheduled stop in Sochi. We just sat there and sat there with no explanation. In fact, the Russian plane was so rickety we wondered if we were having mechanical troubles. Then we watched from our seats as the pilots got out of the plane, talked at length to a few bearded men who were the sort I wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, and the next thing we saw was one of the pilots with a briefcase of money which he opened and showed to the two locals. Next, we saw everyone shaking hands and then the briefcase changed hands. By then the sun was close to disappearing and we were hustled off the plane. It was at that point that we knew we were going to spend the night in the town.
A banged-up bus took us into town, dropped us off in the city square, and someone said to go to a specific hotel for which we would have to pay. Soviet hotels have a Bauhaus boringness with stark straight lines and more concrete than windows, but nevertheless we found a room with windows, a balcony and an adjoining bathroom in the recommended place. It was my husband’s birthday, and the lovely young woman whose beauty was flawed only by her missing front tooth and who was our floor matron, quickly put together a party for him. The majority who came were younger than us, but that made no difference and probably added to the festivities. There were people from Sochi, people she knew from Armenia and probably from several other places, but since we didn’t have language in common, we couldn’t really communicate. Food is a universal language, though, and the lovely floor matron spread out in the hall lots of garlicky sausages, delicious hard bread, dried fruit and more vodka than I
imagined I could find in a vodka factory. There was music from a portable radio, lots of dancing and hugging and drinking, and it really was a different but very special and delightful birthday gathering. My husband really felt special and was probably both exhausted and a bit tipsy when we crawled into bed that early morning. Naturally we hung out the battered plastic sign that said, “Do Not Disturb.”
Not long after we had gone to sleep there was a loud, demanding knock on the door. I was afraid whoever was pounding would literally break the door. “Should you open it?” I mumbled, but my husband proceeded doing what he was doing without responding. Wrapped up in a top sheet, my husband sleepily opened the door, to be confronted by several armed soldiers standing there. You can imagine what went through our minds! “Welcome, Welcome,” said my husband. “Entre, fadil,” he said, using French and Arabic in case they understood those languages. There was no response as I huddled in bed and as the soldiers strolled around as if they owned the place. I really didn’t know what to expect, but as usual, I considered the worst and that was we would be locked up and no one would know where we were. Naturally we let them wander around. They thoroughly examined the room, even looking under the bed before going out on the balcony and coming back in, then picked up a few of our items, turned them over as if examining them close enough to be able to describe them, before one of them turned to us and asked, “Where from you?”
We looked at each other, wondering what to say but responded, “California.” We have often thought when we weren’t sure of what was happening, that sounded less harsh and better than responding with the word America.
“Oh, Hollywood. Yes. Arnold Schwarznagger?” The soldier was obviously an officer.
“Hmm, yes. I know of him,” said my husband. “Big, powerful. Terminator,” said the officer, grinning broadly.
“And Terminator Two,” responded my husband, now smiling.
With that feeling of camaraderie in the room, there was then a group hug with my husband and the soldiers. Putting their arms around each other as if they’d just scored a victory kick in a football game, they hugged each other, pounded each other on their backs, and acted like long lost friends. I, of course, remained in bed but had relaxed since I saw they weren’t going to cart us off to some imaginary, Soviet-style prison.
“Please, we are so happy to keep you safe here in our nation. Please visit again. We are here to serve you. Have a good time here. We keep you safe, always safe here.”
With that, one by one, they bowed politely toward me, shook hands again with my husband, and left the room. In the morning, we both looked at each other. “Did we dream we had visitors last night or did they really come into our room?” we verbalized. A cigar butt on the table was the only tangible reminder. It was indeed a memorable evening, one we both joke about sometimes.
snakeskin smile
Lucy Elgee-Taylor
Lucy Elgee-Taylor is an English Literature graduate from Blackpool, England. Her work explores intimacy, loss, and the tension between the grotesque and beautiful.
your cheap howl that cryptic cry of concern thought you were a dream i’d heard between red lips at a hotel bar your breath, cosmopolitan sour in the weightless air i let you pass through me beating heart blackened and unlatched masquerade boy with the blue marigold lapel you repel, repent unspent victories against my calloused hand you mistook the hit as your own the lone dog hair caught on your boots, our mascara stained mattress did she catch my scent? snakeskin smile and lime green lies you said i was an actress found me waiting in the wings like a beetle on her back screeching, venom antennae your shadowed gaze, grip weakening you could stop me if you tried i won’t whimper voice arrested, abreast the guillotine retired to the tryst i am mist, ivory and undulating i played the part and time isn’t on your side
Again and again in my memory
Anna Stern
Anna Stern, Germany. Training as speech therapist, studies of Fine Arts in Berlin, Münster and Jerusalem, PhD in Art Education. She has been working as a freelance performance artist and singer for three decades, focusing a.o. on transforming English language poetry into music. She has been writing her own poems in English for several years now. Contact: www.annastern.de
Again and again in my memory of that winter morning in Minsk in the seventh year of Lukashenko’s rule he’s sitting there on the untouched bed hands in his lap waiting for me to pick him up for breakfast his dark suit crumpled his eyes empty an old man a survivor
The night before in the lobby he told me of his time in my town in a forced labor camp almost a life’s span ago how soldiers made them clear the debris while the bombs were still falling how they did not dare to cut the mold off their bread rations as nothing would have been left how in the end he drowned his jacket with the ‘East’ badge in a puddle and saw the fleas dancing
Scanning the room I realize the sink dry the towels smooth and white on their metal rack
the cushion still wearing the chambermaid’s slap he must have sat here all night touching nothing trying to leave no trace of his existence a wave of heat washes through my body who takes hot showers fresh towels for granted who knows how to act in a bank a lobby a shopping mall a restaurant a hotel room
In Two Places at Once
Louisa Leith
Louisa Leith writes about her love of the sea and longing for freedom. Reading poetry has long been a delight of hers but authoring, sharing and publishing her own poetry is a new adventure. In addition to writing she spends her time working in healthcare and dreaming of sailing across oceans.
I'm there with you
Our eyes lock, your skin on mine
Lips demand endless kisses
But we're running out of time.
I'm here with them
My hands are full, so's my head
The soundtrack of your voice Plays as I toss in bed
And our love drunk laughter And wistful reminiscence Echo as I try to sleep With torturous persistence. And my heart is breaking With a secret pain
That I cannot confess For fear of the shame And fear of the losses
Of what I have here:
A whole world that I've built And the lives I hold dear.
Tiny hearts that I tend That adore me so deeply
A devoted partner Who trusts me so sweetly.
I'm there with you and I'm free
Intoxicating liberation Erases all my hesitation I forget about my reputation. As I celebrate my emancipation I can't resist the soft sensation Of your caress. The temptation To indulge my imagination
overwhelms me.
And I hope you don't feel indignation that you were the final destination of my self-destructive deviation
From years of wedded dedication
Because of my repressed frustration. Ohgoddontstopdontstop. Ohgod.
At a hotel pretending we're not there
Our last goodbye, you close the door
I pick my clothes up off the floor
I'll always be left wanting more
Because when I kiss you I feel free
I hear the waves and smell the sea
I float like a seagull on the breeze
I'm the wild wind that shakes the trees.
But I can't stay there
I wipe the salt from off my cheeks
Drive home to where I'm meant to be.
I'll take the kids to school tomorrow
Swallowing my guilt and sorrow, Drowning in my suburban life
Whilst you sail the oceans with your wife.
War Recycled
Nicole Powers
Nicole Powers lived in a bombed-out hotel for a while in her youth and the experience taught her what is possible even if you come from a world of privilege. She will remember the interaction of friends as some of the best experiences of her life. A version of this story was published before in Border Tapestry in 2016, under the title No Regrets. Don't count anyone out, everyone can learn.
The young woman sits on the sill of her open window, humming. The radio plays a song by “the little sparrow”, Edith Piaf’s No Regrets. She looks down at the humanity walking under her wet sheets hanging out to dry in the warm sun and thinks about how often she had done this before, and how often hundreds of others had done this before her.
They were lucky to have found this room in the remains of what used to be a grand hotel. The owner having abandoned the luxury trappings of wealth for the safety of political security. The last shelling had taken out the back row of rooms, right along the corridor, and you could still see the rubble and debris left in the fancy courtyard of the elite. It was amazing that the front rooms along the footpath still held on to their former glory. She looked down at her hands, worker’s hands, swollen red and raw from the lye soap she used to scrub brush the sheets on the table with water retrieved from the fountain in the plaza. This was wash-day and the cherished soapy water was reused to scrub the floors clean enough to eat off them. She was weary and content with herself. All in all, a good day.
They lived in a port city. Although the warships in the harbor menaced their daily lives, the fishmonger still came with his cart of treasure. Looking up at her, he beckoned for her to come and admire his catch of the day. Good ole Joe, always saved a special something just for her. He probably saved a special fish for all his customers but somehow, he made her feel as if she was the only one. He might have been a poet or a journalist in better days.
She peeked over to the open bureau drawer to see if her baby stirred… not a muscle. Quickly she grabbed her satchel, and with as little noise as possible, she tip-toed out the door and bounded down the stairs out to the footpath to see what goodies Joe had for her today. Joe was a round and happy man, his cheeks ruddy from his hard life at sea. He told her a tidbit about the song’s refrain they both were listening to a few minutes before…
No Regrets (Non, je ne regrette rien)
No, nothing at all
No, I don't regret anything at all
Neither the good that was given to me
Nor the evil
They’re all the same to me
According to Joe, the little sparrow had dedicated this song to the French Foreign Legion. At the time, the 1st Foreign Parachute Regiment had backed a failed putsch by the French military against civilian leadership of Algeria when the military coup was broken. Their leadership was arrested and tried. The non-commissioned officers had to be reassigned. The regiment marched out of the barracks singing Piaf’s song. Algeria was liberated from the French!
The young woman was impressed because the civilians triumphed over professional soldiers. She looked around at her own situation and decided she would buy whatever Joe had for her on his cart. It happened to be sardines, one of her favorites. Surrounded by the despair, desolation, and destruction brought on by the war all around her, she ran back to her room with her stomach growling. At least for tonight, “No Regrets!”
The Suite Life of a 'Motel Kid':
Growing up Behind the
Lobby
Foram Mehta
Foram Mehta is an Indian-American freelance journalist and fulltime content strategist based in Washington, D.C., where she lives with her husband, son and calico cat. She's the author of Little Ripples, Big Waves, a children's picture book on collective action. When she's not running after her toddler, she's honing her organic urban gardening skills, experimenting with fermentations and dreaming up her next story. The piece you are about to read has been previously published in HuffPost Personal in May 2019.
I remember one of the first times I told my classmates that I lived in a motel. I was 8 years old new to the small central Texas town where my parents had taken over at a mom-and-pop motel and was just old enough that my peers understood the gravity of our differences. (That and they had a preconceived notion of glamour that accompanied hotel life, thanks to “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York” and the new Disney show, “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.”) Instantly, I transformed from the weird brown girl who didn’t eat meat -- basically a sin in Texas -- into the fascinating new character in their small-town drama. The equivalent of a press conference followed:
“Do you sleep in a room every night?!”
“No, my family’s ‘house’ is attached to the lobby, actually. Inside there’s a living room, a kitchen, a couple of bedrooms and bathrooms pretty much like a normal apartment. Except it’s in a motel...”
“Do you order room service all the time?!”
“Definitely not. Anyway, my parents would be in charge of that, and they already cook me food. Is that the same thing?”
“O.K., so if I come to your ‘house,’ where to do I go?”
“Just come to the front desk, and I’ll let you in through the side door!”
It’s estimated that about half of all U.S. motels are owned by Indian Americans, most of whom are Gujaratis, a group of people originating from the Western Indian state of Gujarat. My parents, most of my aunts and uncles, some cousins, and innumerable extended family members fall into this group. Indians have been running hotels in the U.S. as far back as the 1940s, and not much has changed about the way they do business. Because when you raise your family at your place of work, everything is a family affair. I’m what they call in the community a “motel kid.”
Growing up behind the inconspicuous motel lobby side door wasn’t all allure, mystery and thrills like my friends pictured in their colorful imaginations. It really wasn’t any of those things. It was strange— abnormal even. It was hardly glamorous, and sometimes it was scary. The
unforeseen implications of not living in a “normal” house and often pitching in at the family business meant I didn’t experience the same childhood as my American friends, and I couldn’t totally relate to my other Indian American friends either. Somewhere in between and yet in a universe of its own, motel kid life was truly one-of-a-kind. Admittedly, “one-of-a-kind” is a euphemism for “weird,” a term most kids despise during the formative years of their lives. So I won’t lie that I didn’t have days when all I wanted was to walk through a cookie-cutter door in a cookie-cutter house, but the truth is motel kid life was chock-full of life lessons—you know, the type you hate learning the hard way and are so grateful for later?
I can remember the recurrent theme of the hard-earned dollar on TV sitcoms of American parents trying to teach their kids that “money doesn’t grow on trees.” As a motel kid, the value of a dollar was hardly lost on me because I watched the full cycle of a dollar in my parents’ business. From the moment a guest checked in to the time housekeepers were paid. That didn’t account for utilities, replacing damaged or stolen items (seriously, please don’t steal the alarm clock and towels…), and maintenance expenses. Like with any mom-and-pop business, my parents frequently rolled up their sleeves and did what needed to get done. And when the staff flaked or there was a shortage of hands, the kids—my sister and I-pitched in, too.
From polishing furniture and making beds to working the reception desk, one of the earliest and most important things I learned was the true value of money. Beyond that, I also grasped how critical humility was in fostering good workplace relationships and the overall success of a business. There was never a task too small, too menial, or too taxing for my parents to do when necessary. It’s a far departure from the work culture I’ve witnessed in many modern-day companies, in which “collaboration” and “a team-player attitude” are mostly talk among higher-ups. Where many of my former managers have failed simply to lead by example, I often reflect on the lessons of my childhood and doubledown to complete a task. Because when there’s a job to get done, someone’s got to step up to the plate, right?
The old adage goes, “The customer is always right.” I bet, though, the copywriter behind the hospitality industry’s unofficial tagline, wasn’t subjected to the insufferability of some customers. Had they been, I think they’d wholeheartedly concede to the more reasonable, “The customer is almost always right.” Suffice it to say, there are a lot of characters you meet as a hotel receptionist. During my many shifts at the front desk, I interacted with just about every type from the “I need more towels at 11 p.m.” lady to the “Can you transfer my call to my girlfriend’s room [for the 200th time]?” guy. Learning the ropes of customer service early on not only demanded patience (not always so easy for a hormonal teen), but also the ability to discern between what was right and wrong. In the post-9/11 world, racism abound towards pretty much any brown person. Most South Asians can personally attest to being victim or knowing someone who suffered flagrant xenophobic sentiments hurled at them. For motel kids, though, inviting strangers into your home adds a complicated layer to an already atypical situation. Shortly after 9/11, I can vividly remember a man angrily calling my dad “Osama” after what I can only assume was an unsatisfactory customer service experience. He was politely asked to leave. It wasn’t the last time my parents suffered a racist slur or otherwise derogatory comment conducting business.
It was, however, one of the first times I understood that in some situations, the people we serve or work for aren’t always right, and not every dollar is worth earning—not at the cost of your dignity. Though it was a difficult reality to face as a child, it taught me early to stand up for myself when the time called for it. When at 25, I faced blatant sexism and misogyny at a thankless job with no room for professional or personal growth, I knew I had to leave. It wasn’t the last time I quit in the face of oppression, and it may likely not be the last. But, as I learned early on, there’s a fine line between smiling through gritted teeth and tossing your self-respect out the window. And I am not willing to do the latter.
My formative years were marked by numerous moves, always to run a new motel in a relatively small town in the South. Kids in school, who could trace their family lines generations back, couldn’t fathom someone actually moving to their neck of the woods particularly someone like me,
someone from a continent across the world. “Why?!” They’d ask, mouths agape, in utter disbelief.
It was quite simple to me, though. Motel life allowed people like my parents an opportunity to achieve the American Dream through selfreliance and hard work. Small town businesses are the bedrock of selfmade success in this country, and for immigrants, they offer a chance to navigate around social and legal structures that may otherwise not grant the critical stepping stone to better opportunities.
From the motel in rural Oklahoma to Central Texas and The Bible Belt in East Texas, my formative years were marked by frequent moves, usually every two years. In fact, because I’ve never lived more than six years in one place, I’m partially convinced I’m conditioned for the nomadic lifestyle. How serendipitous my husband, who’s also Indian, bopped around similarly as a kid but for entirely different reasons. Home base will be wherever we put a pin on the map. Every new motel took us to a town bigger, affording us more “normal” pleasures like a nearby mall, movie theater, or Taco Bell that didn’t require driving to the next city waiting 30 minutes to eat a Mexican Pizza just isn’t the same. Regardless of where we ended up, though, there was almost always a welcoming party of sorts to greet us upon arrival (and sometimes an onsite pool!). The neighboring motels housed families like mine, bootstrapped immigrants, striving to create a new normal for themselves in what was a very atypical situation. At dinner parties and societal functions, my parents would bemoan their daily struggles to the only people who could truly relate, while I’d mingle with the few friends who were my age. Study sessions, playdates, and phone conversations were rarely private or uninterrupted, often scored by the soundtrack of ringing phones, dinging bells, and general chatter from the reception desk, which could always be heard through the security camera and walkie-talkie we kept in our private residence. Outside the motel’s walls, the continuity of white noise molded my perception of a normal existence. Whether it was living yards away from the ear-splitting freight train in one town or right off a major highway in another, I became so accustomed to 24-hour-sound and light that later in life, I’d wonder how anyone could ever live (and sleep) peacefully in the dead stillness of
suburbia. I also have an unnatural uneasiness about cavernous rooms in large, spacious homes. Years later, when I moved to bustling New York City after college, new acquaintances would often inquire about the state of “culture shock” they assumed I experienced upon leaving Nowheresville, Texas for the biggest city in America. I credited my college years in Austin which, back then, was still weird for some of it. But in all honesty, the round-the-clock hubbub, the unpredictability of strangers, the small living spaces? This was familiar to me, a comfortable, navigable situation that felt more like home than any other mid-sized metro where people—gasp!—lived in quiet, gated communities with four-bedroom houses and backyards.
Moving so much as a kid, it was tough to maintain friends, especially in the pre-internet days, although my friends and I did send snail mail for as long as it felt natural. So transience became my most reliable friend. Beyond my physically changing environment, I bore witness to the everchanging seasons of motel business. The ebbs and flows of guests, the peaks and dips of business, nothing was ever much the same. As our circumstances changed, we adjusted accordingly to them—not the other way around. Of course, when the family business dictates where you live, how often you’re able to travel together (rarely), the number of times you’re the new kid in school (often), and the sheer unpredictability of what’s to come next, you become comfortable with the one constant in life: change.
At 30 years old, I look back at my motel kid childhood with perspective: Decades of moves, countless relationships both long-lasting and shortlived, many accomplishments, and innumerable setbacks flood my memory. Today, I’m once again acclimating myself to a new group of characters, circumstances and challenges in the ninth city I’ve called home since birth, playing a new role of “wife.” As a writer/editor, I didn’t end up following in my parents’ footsteps per se, but I like to think that I inherited a bit of their scrappiness and hustle, if nothing more than to stick to an unpredictable career and see it through wholeheartedly. And as it turns out, after 30 years of living in an apartment, bouncing around from city to city, I’m not sure I’m cut out for the cookie-cutter door with the
cookie-cutter house. It’s a little too cookie-cutter for this motel kid, anyway.
Wedding Bells
Nicholas Panagakos
Nicholas Panagakos was born in Winsted, Connecticut. He has lived in Massachusetts for fourteen years and has worked more jobs than he should have. He is always tired.
This is a true story.
In the early 2010s, I was working as a doorman and bellman in a boutique hotel beside Faneuil Hall in Boston. I primarily worked the second shift between the hours of 3pm and 11pm, and it was an alright job. The money was good when it was, but sometimes it wasn’t. Some nights I would go home with $150 in my pocket, some nights I left with $15 in my pocket. Either way, it was spent at the bar. Or on something harder. The winter months were the worst.
Being a boutique hotel, we catered to all sorts of private events held in our restaurant’s bar or in the second-floor dining room. There was a time when the hotel would hold musical performances on the second floor of the restaurant with different popular artists. These were ticketed events and that meant the valet would be busy parking the cars of not only the hotel guests, but the event guests as well. We had a pretty good thing going with the valet’s where we would rip old tickets that had already been used. We called them “stubbies”. So, when Mr. and Mrs. Rockefeller came in with a brand-new Cadillac or a BMW, we would rip them a stubbie, charge them $20, always cash, and split it evenly between the valet’s and the doormen. We’d keep the cars in front of the hotel so that none of the vehicles were scanned and parked in the garage. The guests saw it as top-tier service, and we compensated for their cheapness. As long as none of us got greedy, there was peace in the valley. This was a method of survival because we knew that the guests seldom tipped on the way out. It was a common occurrence to hear a guest say, “I’ll get you on the way out.” Funny how they seemed to leave when someone else was there. Either that, or they were too drunk to remember. Sometimes they would say, “I already tipped the other guy,” which they did not.
There was always somebody who felt cheated with the system we had worked out, so every now and again, someone would rat, and we’d get pulled into meetings with hotel management and the valet companies. They’d tell us it was stealing, and we’d say that every hotel and restaurant in the city does it, which they did. We’d agree not to do it anymore, cool it for a few weeks, and then start up again. I was pulled into plenty of
meetings about it, just like everyone else. I would eventually be fired for it later.
This particular evening, we were hosting a wedding reception for two families who decided to join forces through a matrimonial bond of their adult children. They showed up drunk, stayed drunk, went to the ceremony drunk, and returned to the hotel wasted. These were locals, too. North Shore Massachusetts folk. Working class families who scrimped and saved to have a full blown, three-day weekend in Boston. Lucky us, they picked our spot. What I found most comforting about the encounter was that they all reminded me of people I either grew up with or family I’d known. I don’t know if that speaks more about me than it does for them, but I liked them right away.
There was this one uncle, wasn’t sure which side of the aisle he’d be sitting on, but he’d spend most of his time chain smoking cigarettes on the front steps. We had a lot of good conversations talking about a lot of different things. I feel bad that I don’t remember his name, but I was committed to some serious self-inflicted brain damage at the time. Even though a lot of my memory is fuzzy, I remember all of this clearly.
He was complaining about family drama, which always comes up around holidays and weddings. Any time family gets together, really. I was listening politely while he smoked and asked me about whether I liked the job. I told him I did, and I meant it, but I also took the opportunity to vent on some of the more egregious slights against my person. I had been punched in the face by a guest once, but that’s a different story. I didn’t talk about money because I didn’t want to sound like I was fishing for a tip. Honestly, if I liked you as a person, I didn’t mind if you kept your five dollars. He asked me what I did in my free time, and he nodded politely when I said I liked to write stories. We didn’t pursue the topic further.
The morning of the wedding began with cosmeticians and stylists showing up at six in the morning to do hair and make-up for the bride and her crew of hangover townies. I can tell because I too am often a hangover townie. I just happened to leave my hometown. The big day arrives, and everybody leaves dressed to the nines and looking like death warmed over. The smell
of perfume and cologne mixed with the alcohol from the previous night still sweating out from their pores. I’m on a twelve-hour shift because someone called out the night before. I figured the money would be good because wedding parties remember you when they leave and come back. This was also a union hotel, so we had overtime after eight hours. I could stand to be a little tired if that were the case. Like I said, I liked them already.
After they had all left for the wedding the rest of the day moved slowly, and without incident. The only hassle was a television crew that had been staying on one of the floors for the past three months filming a syndicated reality show. They had signed on to an extended block of rooms for a total of six months, so the hotel bent over backwards to make sure they were comfortable and always taken care of. This was often at the expense of the staff. We, the staff, didn’t like them. Hell, we didn’t like most people, really. I used to be a real nice guy before I started working in hotels. There were a few special cases.
The wedding party returned around four that evening. Drunk again, loud again, wasted again, and looking for more. My friend Uncle was smoking outside like the kind of person who could handle his liquor. This man had experience. The only way I could tell he had been drinking was a bit of color in his cheeks and he was smiling more than he had been previously. He shook my hand with a twenty-dollar bill in his palm and asked me why I was still working. I laughed, thanked him for the twenty, and told him I would be on till seven for the overtime. He punched my shoulder harder than I would have liked and told me I was a good man. If he was slightly more drunk, I think he would have gone for a hug. I wouldn’t have minded if he did. Making those kinds of real human connections at work was rare.
My manager came out to the front and made a face as the drunken wedding part had taken over the restaurant. He shook his head and immediately apologized when he noticed Uncle standing outside talking with me. Uncle didn’t care. He even had some choice words of his own. It was that autumn kind of night where you could wear a jacket if you wanted to. My manager was finally relaxing and getting into the spirit of
our conversation when one of the television producers poked his head through the door to tell us that there was an active brawl happening on the third floor. Uncle stood unfazed while my manager and I sprinted up the stairs with security. I had no business being up there, but they didn’t know the specifics of what was happening. I’m really crap in a fight. Probably would have made it worse if I was needed.
By the time we got to the third floor, the fight was pretty much over. We found the groom standing over his stepdad with his sleeves rolled up and breathing heavy. His fists were white, and his face was red. His stepdad was on the ground with a busted lip and an egg on his head (for those who are unfamiliar with the vernacular, having an egg on one’s head means that he was struck on the noggin so hard that the swelling resembles an egg. It is primarily unsightly and a little souvenir that will become bruised with all sorts of colors). The bride, unfortunately, was huddled in the hallway corner, crying behind a shield of screaming bridesmaids.
The floor of the hallway was covered in lipstick tubes, pallets, and vials of cosmetics. There were also piles of cash, credit cards, tissues, gloves, loose change, and all the other things you keep in your purse or pocket. It looked like someone had exploded. There was also an open flip-knife of an illegal length on the floor. When I saw that, I immediately reached down with my hand covered by my pocket. I closed the blade against my leg and dropped it into my pocket to remove it from play. Thankfully at that point no one had been cut. Still, I didn’t want to have any of my fingerprints on the knife. At that point, we decided to close the restaurant and have every family member not facing charges return to their rooms. No one in the bar knew what had happened so there was almost another fight downstairs when we asked them to leave.
As the story goes, the groom’s stepfather was getting a little too rough and fresh with the groom’s mother. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was already a substantial opinion that the groom held regarding his stepfather. Probably wouldn’t have taken much to push it that far, but slapping his mother around would have been a powder keg. And it was. I’m not a
gambler, but I would imagine that was not the first time they had exchanged blows.
It was a mess after that. The police were called, and folks were questioned. I never mentioned the knife, but I did give it to security to hold onto. A lot of the guests in the wedding party started demanding refunds for their rooms. Even the stepdad asked the cops if he could get a refund, and that was when they were pushing his head into the cruiser. After the dust had settled and everybody got back to work, I was back at my post on the front steps with Uncle as he smoked another cigarette. He offered one to me and I broke the rules by smoking with him on the steps. We both sat down, and he started to laugh thinking about the wedding pictures for the photo album. I haven’t enjoyed a wedding since. That one topped them all.
Rolling a suitcase into the lobby, I approached the front desk. The clerk looked up when I entered. As I neared the desk, he smiled.
Handing him my papers, he looked at me with approving eyes. I returned the gaze and noticed his dark wavy hair, bright blue eyes, rose lips, perhaps a bit of eye makeup.
“Bonsoir monsieur, je m’appelle Cosette.”
Pen dancing between his fingers, he handed me a card to sign. Returning it, our fingers touched and an erotic, almost magnetic, charge traveled up my arm. The sensation halfway between strong magnetism and light electricity. I shrugged.
He now rolled the suitcase and I followed him to a large room. At the door I offered a tip. He pushed my hand away with a single finger. The erotic charge coursed through me again as he bowed his head to leave.
As the door closed, the room darkened. Alone in a corner room on the top floor of the hotel I opened all the draperies to both balconies. Finding the light switch, I fell in love, my room now bathed in the purple light of a Murano glass chandelier. I wondered at the purple globes reflected in mirrors and gloss black furniture.
Opening the French doors, waves of warm summer air filled the room. Light traffic noises from far below drifted upward and the fading light of dusk accented rooftops. Lights began to appear in apartment windows as I stood watching the evening descend on the city.
I decided to spend time in the hammam spa, called the front desk, and attempted a phrase in French, “S'il vous plait chaleur le spa?” He paused, starting to correct my French, “Veuillez chauffer...” paused again, and said, “Oui, oui belle demoiselle.” Did he call me pretty? But assured me the spa would be ready in half an hour.
I turned on the shower and I stepped into a luxurious glass enclosure. A gentle storm of hot water bounced off skin surfaces and onto the marble floor.
Seeing my image in the mirror, I imagined someone watching from across the street. That thought and purple lights flooding over my nakedness aroused me. Then I imagined a fantasy - the desk clerk entering the room and joining me. A fantasy, only a fantasy.
Reluctant, I turned off the faucet, rang the clerk and asked for a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket, to drink when I returned from the spa. The clerk asked in English, “What can I do for you, pretty lady?” Aroused and confident I answered in French, “S’il vous plaît apporter une bouteille de champagne dans une seau à glace?”
“Voulez-vous boire toute la bouteille seule?” Did he ask if I was going to drink the bottle alone? The words uncertain, but he added, “Quoi que votre coeur désire ma belle demoiselle.”
“Whatever your heart desires.” Tempting me to write down those desires and leaving a note at his desk on my way through the lobby. I slipped on my bikini bottoms and imagined walking to the spa topless. Erring on the side of modesty, I donned the robe as I left the room.
He glanced up smiling and waved as I passed. I sensed his eyes roaming the naked skin below the robe and almost regretted wearing it. Senses heightened, my thoughts wild.
Removing my bikini and hanging it with the robe, I slipped inside the steam room. Warm mists enveloped me. I sat in the steam for many minutes then heard a soft cough. A man, hidden in the steam, rose. Naked as well, he nodded toward me, then left with an admiring glance back.
Further aroused by this encounter, I melted into the steam on the slick tile. Time was lost until the door cracked open and he appeared, the clerk, asking, “Avez-vous besoin de quelque chose de belle demoiselle?” Thinking he asked if everything was all right, I nodded and said “Oui, oui, merci.”
He called me beautiful again and now saw me, all of me even if surrounded by Hammam mists. His attention was like electricity, and the
mutual attraction like magnetism. I sat up as the mists of the spa swirled about him in the doorway.
He smiled, then turned to leave, hesitating for a moment. I thought then of slipping behind him, lifting his shirt, and pressing my bare breasts against his back. As this new fantasy played out, the door closed.
Then I realized he asked if I needed anything. I did not stop thinking about him and what he might think I wanted. I knew he sensed my own lust and arousal. It had to be in the in the spaces between us as I felt it inside my body.
Remembering the champagne in the room and rising into the shower I rinsed in cold-water and wrapped myself in the robe. With a tinge of disappointment, I did not see the clerk as I passed through the lobby. There was only his jacket hanging over a chair, and a woman standing in the doorway, her back to me. Walking up the stairs, I allowed the robe to open. Though no one else was in the stairway, it was an act of blissful freedom. I entered the room and turned on the lights. The table empty, the champagne not in the room. A sinking sensation arose in my chest. He had forgotten my request.
I picked up the phone distracted by a light tap on the door. I wrapped my robe tight and turned, the phone still in my hand. The knob rotated and the door cracked open. The clerk poked his head in and without apology entered with the ice bucket cradled in his arm. He smiled, slipped off his shoes to bare feet, and said, “Vous voilà. Votre champagne ma jolie femme.” My heart began to race as I noticed two upturned glasses buried in the ice. Fantasies are fantasies, apparently until they are not.
I wrapped the robe tighter and stared. At the bottle, at his hands, at his fingers holding the ice bucket. Relieved that he did not forget the champagne, I set the phone back in the cradle. Facing him I whispered, “Bonsoir bienvenue, merci beaucoup, plaisez entrent.” My French was improving. My senses were full. The arrival of the champagne, the eroticism of his bare feet in my room, the two glasses. He looked at me and smiled, setting the bucket on the table.
I sat down on the edge of the bed as he opened the bottle dressed only in tuxedo slacks and an untucked shirt. Erotic energy surrounded us. Gentle lightning strikes from my shoulders traveled down my legs and my toes began to tingle. No reason left to resist temptation.
I rose from the bed, letting the robe open wide, and hypnotized, floated across the space and placed both hands on his back. Sighing, his muscles under the shirt rose to meet my fingers. He did not turn around. Encouraged, I slid his shirt up his back and pressed my bare breasts to his naked skin. Like I imagined in the steam room but here with him in my private room. He gasped and leaned back into me, head tilted, lips close to mine. I could have kissed him.
He hesitated a moment then poured the champagne, enjoying my breasts grazing his bare skin. His hands seemed a bit unsteady as he poured. Knowing he was aroused I reached around him to explore. My hand slid around to the front of his body, fingertips brushing him rock hard under only the light fabric.
He began to turn, a glass in each hand. Careful not to spill, he paused until I stepped back and released him. He handed me a glass. I sat back on the end of the bed, my cold glass in my hand, mad with lust.
He stood, observing my body under the still opened robe. His fingers held the stem of the glass, lips parted over the rim, the tip of his tongue visible between them. I thought, “J’aimerais que to embrasses moi.” I wanted to taste his lips, feel his tongue.
My glass still in hand, I placed a bare foot on his chest. He stared at my toes and drained, then set aside his glass. Unbuttoning his shirt he slid the cloth out from under my foot.
I moved my other foot to the front of his pants and curled my toes over the distinct hardness. His eyes rolled and he uttered a soft, harmonic purr. I lowered the other foot, making a playful attempt to open the button. We laughed and he helped, his tuxedo pants dropping to the floor.
Now naked except for silk briefs, I caressed him through the light fabric with my soles and toes. I knew he wanted to remove his briefs, but I did not let him, not yet. I handed him my own empty glass and rose before him as my robe dropped to the floor.
I watched his eyes explore every inch of bare skin. I turned to show him every part in a subtle, demure, mindful dance. His attention produced tremors within me. My hands reached for the silk briefs and gazing into his eyes I whispered, “Je veux te voir.” “I want to see you. ”
Slow and deliberate, I slid his briefs down over his thighs, my face and hair grazing his aroused sex. I rose as the silk dropped to his ankles.
We embraced, soft breasts firm on his chest, hard cock between our bellies, rigid and pulsing. Pressed into my chest his heart seemed to beat in synchrony with my own. “Prenez moi.” I wanted him.
I led him to the bed and with a gentle push sat him at the edge and knelt down between his feet. I stroked him with affectionate care, sensing that now familiar erotic energy between our skin surfaces. He sat watching my focus. One hand stroking him, the other cupping his testicles.
Slipping him between my lips, I held him in soft in my mouth and tender in my hands, my floating fingers moving over him until I sensed rhythmic contractions. He would soon orgasm.
But not now. I needed to prolong this, and I wanted more champagne. Releasing him to jump off the bed, I looked in the mirror as I poured one glass. His rapt attention palpable, my back, my bottom, my thighs, and my calves. Feeling like feathers of attention floating over my skin. In the mirror I watched as he stood and moved behind me, his erection like a bridge between us. My legs parted, nipples hardened, as he closed the gap between us.
He wrapped his arms around my waist and pressed into my back as I took a sip. Then I faced him and offered a drink. I stared as his lips opened and the liquid flowed into his mouth. “Embrasse moi.” “Please kiss me.”
His lips moved toward mine and I set the glass down. The tips of our tongues met, his sliding into my mouth. The kiss broke when I whispered, “Je veux tes lèvres sur mon sexe.” “I want your lips on my sex.”
With strength and finesse, he guided me onto the bed, knelt on the floor between my knees, hands on either side of my hips. He pulled my hips into him, his mouth hovering over me in desire. He kissed me as he kissed me on my lips.
We merged in that moisture, and as he kissed me I uttered a silent scream. Magnetism, electricity, this sweet intimacy. His kisses filled me with intense passion. The tip of his tongue penetrated me, the extreme pleasure, forcing me to push away.
I wanted to sit with him naked on the balcony. Together, we moved through the doorway. A warm, gentle breeze swept over us. He laid his hand on my belly, and whispered, “Puis-je vous toucher?” I thought, “Oh yes, ohmygod, yes.” I wanted him to touch me and closed my eyes to visualize his fingers as they slid into the moisture of my arousal.
Strong energies emanated from his hand, his beautiful fingers deep inside me. Impassioned I spread my legs as his skilled touch brought me close to climax. With sparks of energy, I wanted to remain here, on the verge, forever.
Sensing my energy, and impassioned resistance, his hand moved over my belly and paused between my breasts. My heart opened, pouring love into the space between us, the love flooding out into the Paris night.
I laid my hand over his, the waves of energy subsiding. I pulled his hand away from my chest, and pleaded, “S’il vous plaît se baigner avec moi!”
I floated into the shower, starting the water, and peered at my flushed face in the mirror as he appeared behind me. His voice shaking, he uttered, “Jamais dans ma vie belle fille.” “Never in my life, beautiful girl.” I grasped his hand and we walked into the warm spray.
I soaped his back and pressed my breasts into the lather. He sighed, melting into my embrace. Similar sighs escaped my own lip. He held me.
He could not be more aroused, his erection pulsating and sliding over the soapy moist surface of my skin. His lips found mine and we kissed in ecstasy. As committed lovers, I would have guided him into me and enveloped him within the moisture of my arousal. Reluctant, I pushed away, turning under the purple rain and rinsed the soap from my vibrating body.
I jumped on the bed, still wet and wanting him to join me. He walked toward me, “Puis-je utiliser votre serviette?” He dried his body with my towel. He stood admiring me, naked on the bed. He studied my tattoos, intrigued by my dimples, and pressed his finger into one. I reached for his hand, pulling him alongside me on the bed.
I moved my lips to his ear, whispering, “Il reste du champagne dans la bouteille?” He rose, found the bottle and poured us another shared glasss.
Walking back, the glass between his sensual fingers, he still visibly aroused. He took a single sip and offered me the glass. He sat beside me as I took the glass with one hand and pulled him closer with the other. Taking a final sip I reached for him to draw him close. The glass fell off the bed onto the floor.
Moaning, our bodies moved together with increased ardor and passion. His cock slid between my loving hands and onto the skin of my belly. With each thrust he moaned with pleasure. Erotic sensations within me climbing to climax as his movements became more determined.
His hands held my hips as they followed his movements. We both began to orgasm.
His semen flowed onto my belly as his fingers slid over and deep into me. The tremors of my orgasm pulsed over and we came as our lips met in a kiss of intense passion. I explored his face as his eyes opened to look into mine.
Sensations subsiding, our bodies relaxed into aftershocks of bliss. Moments passed with our legs entwined, the scents of our lust floating between us.
We dozed in that glow and I slept until my alarm went off. The clock read 3:00. I was in bed alone. The capped bottle of champagne still in the bucket, I knew one glass remained. Then I noticed an envelope leaning against the bucket. I pulled the sheet along with me as I rose, draping it over my shoulders. I opened the envelope and filled a glass. I walked the few steps to the balcony doorway and read the note.
A poem, written in French:
Une charmante dame profondément endormiFermé dans elle privé garde
Cocooned parmi une pièce blanche douce
Whelmed dans comme dans un uterus
Le corps nu comme une Eve
Though principale tissée dans une manche de lin
Comme des pauses du matin pour casser les ténèbres
Qu'Elle ralentit apparaît de son tombeau*
Tears filled my eyes, tears of beautiful memories, lust and passion so intense left only behind in gentle scents.
I dressed, packed, closed my suitcase, and rode the elevator to the lobby. The woman sat at the desk. She smiled and handed me a receipt. I already paid for the room when I booked the reservation so needed only to pay for the champagne. But there were no extra charges listed.
*A lovely lady sound asleep
Closed into her private keep
Cocooned amidst a soft white room
Whelmed within as in a womb
Body naked as primal Eve
Though woven in a linen sleeve
As morning breaks to break the gloom
She will slow emerge from her dreamy tomb
Brendan Csaposs
Dr. Brendan Csaposs is an educator, consultant, and storyteller, weaving together threads of human experience, global connection, and a deep seated belief in the transformative power of love. His work spans continents, from the vibrant academic landscapes of Eastern and Southern Africa, to communities across the continental United States. A humanitarian a lover of life, culture, and experience and above all a wandering spirit Brendan has integrated varied life learnings to create inclusive spaces where diverse voices thrive. In his writing, much like in his activism, Brendan cultivates narratives of desire, belonging, joy, and the allencompassing power of human connection to equally build us up and destroy us. IG: @jiggaholic; Website: http://itsbrendan.net
there’s something so intimate in the way you lie there night after Night in your fetid little hotel bed.
waiting and watching like a stoical spider from the safety of your freshly spun web just relaxing and reclining for the rightly configured cluster of figures to flash across so many frenzied pixels.
answering query after query assuaging concerns dropping coordinates managing logistical logarithms to steer each ship gently to your eager port so you can cater to their every concern.
patiently posing as each brief visitor enters and disrobes the awkward moments of stilted conversation or
the rushed silence of a reached hand it doesn’t matter the style just secure your satisfaction.
springs straining against the weight of a chorus of bodies groaning and gasping for connection however fleeting and futile but it’s there even if just for this brief moment in space.
massaging the fright from the meek and the rage from the furious tenderly taking their biggest and smallest their roughest and most tender advances then draining their cares their fears away.
there’s something so tender in each touch and caress something so intimate to this
hub at the centre of so many spokes this epicentre of connection and community and care.
Rest in Peace, Liesalots
Dominique Margolis
Dominique Margolis is a widely published author with a unique voice. Her work often brings light to challenging topics with grace, spirituality, and humor, inviting readers to explore complex themes while feeling uplifted and enlightened.
Lily was born into a Liesalot family, the kind of people who loved her for show and personal use, not for real. For twenty years, she dwelled in their lair. Then, she moved far. Unfortunately, even after she’d moved to the other end of the earth, her poisonous past continued to live within her.
On her thirtieth birthday, she wished for something soft to help her go on. Adin showed up. He was not soft, but he was outrageous, so for the first few hours, she hoped that his company would be enough to keep her head above water and save her heart from drowning.
Adin fine dined her on their first date, and then he took her to his hotel room. He was on business from out of town, and he thought he was falling in love, so he stripped naked. Lily, a bit shy because she was not a drinker, only partially undressed. He snapped a photo of her while asking if it was ok for him to do so. She flinched and said no, but it was too late.
Lily started to worry that perhaps Adin was a long-lost Liesalot comfortable with trampling her inner life and wishes. But then again, Lily was lonely, and she had a heart that needed to be cupped softly, so she looked for what was good in Adin. He was tender, mostly, she told herself, even though his breath smelled of stale wine. Plus, she had managed to cross her arms over her bare chest so there wouldn’t be a photo of her naked circulating on the Internet.
Adin kept checking his phone on the nightstand. Important work stuff, he said, until someone knocked on the door. It could not have been room service.
Gloriously naked, he marched towards the door. Welcomed in another man.
Addressing Adin, the stranger said, as if Lily wasn’t there under the sheet pulled up to her nose, that she looked like the woman on the photo that Adin had posted online. For once, Adin had not deceived him on the merchandise.
Lily froze. Adin told her that he had asked Stevie to come over because he was certain that she would enjoy him. “I certainly enjoy him!” he added, cupping Stevie’s face before kissing him on the lips lasciviously.
Lily became someone else to herself. She did not drown but focused instead on the steel doorknob of the hotel room door. She told the two men how much they turned her on before excusing herself to go to the bathroom. She would be right back, she said, so Adin and Stevie did not notice that she was taking her purse and her clothes and her shoes with her.
For years afterward, Lily would go on celebrating her surreptitious exit as the first step in her long road to recovery from narcissistic abuse by all the Liesalots of the world. Once a year, she drew a tombstone on a piece of recycled paper that read, “Rest in Peace, Liesalots,” and she buried it at least half a foot under the earth around the time of All Saints’ Day.
The Joke
Laura Bota
Laura Bota is a Romanian writer and avid traveler who has called the Netherlands home since 2017. Her work is rooted in the emotional terrain of (post-)communist Romania and explores existential crises, social injustice, and the long shadows of political trauma. She was one of eleven nominees for the 2023 One Khasi Hills Creative Prize and received an Honorable Mention in the 2024 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. Her poems and short stories have appeared in multiple international journals and anthologies, including Beyond Words, Grande Dame Literary, Half and One, Free Spirit, The Bangalore Review, and Down in the Dirt. For her, writing is an intimate act of reckoning with the past, with identity, and with the contradictions of being human.
Dear Reader, this is a true story, recounted to the best of my ability, as I myself heard it from various students who heard the girl’s screams lingering for months and years after that winter night. This is no joking matter, so a fair warning is due for the sensitive, deep-feeling souls out there. But if you’re up for a slice and dice of real life, take a seat, wrap yourself in a warm blanket, get that favorite drink of yours: a cup of steaming tea, a glass of cold or mulled wine or, why not, something stronger for the reading ride.
--Bucharest, December 2022
“Dumb kids,” Nora rolls her eyes at the phone ringing like a hysteric cowbell. “But what if?” she mumbles when the ringing stops, flipping through this week’s newspaper to a fat-lettered title that reads Thirty years since tragedy hit. “Nonsense,” she flings the paper back onto the counter with a thud.
If only she could get some rest. Nora hides a yawn with the back of her hand with George Michael pining over his last Christmas lover in the background. She peeks over the reception desk to the Art Nouveau lobby, where a few guests have gathered around a faux fireplace, next to a silver Christmas tree, with a mug of mulled wine in one hand and a Santa-shaped gingerbread cookie in the other. Blissful ignorance of the past floating heavy in the air, Nora fidgets behind her desk.
She should ask for a raise, she mumbles, staring at the quiet phone. After all, she's worked here since the hotel re-opened over a decade ago. And yet, somehow she still gets the night shifts. “Staff with families and children have priority,” the manager instructed the other day. Like you, a brat-making machine with three at home and another on the way, Nora almost blurted out, but she simply nodded: “Yes, boss.”
With no kids, no husband, no boyfriend or girlfriend, for that matter, she never minded working late before; in her twenties, she used to call herself the Night Queen of this place, but now she’s getting tired of these calls, after five nights in a row. How she’d tell those punks a few words if she
were alone, she grunts when the ringing starts again. The guests’ prattle has slowed down so she can’t ignore the phone without drawing their glares.
Stupid brats, she casts a glance towards the elevator’s flashy doors, leave that girl alone, she wants to shout picking up the phone, but instead, she says in a honey-coated tone:
“Good evening, this is Hotel Cișmigiu, how may I help you?”
Bucharest, December 1992
Neli wrapped her mother’s scarlet scarf around her neck and pressed the elevator button, groping through semi-darkness. The light was out again in the hallway. Mental note to remind the administrator, Neli sighed. Not that reminders were what the man was lacking. After all, Neli had lost count of the number of times she’d spoken to him. First about the broken windows and the leaky roof, then about the ice-cold showers or the clogged up toilets and the rats, and now about the lights crackling and flickering on each floor, and in every hallway. The elevator had always been a creaky metal box, ever since she moved into this improvisation of a dorm over a year ago. And yet, all the man could do was shrug and slur: “Old hotel, old wiring, old piping, Miss,” sipping his piss-like liquid from a plastic bottle. “Hotel?! A bad joke of a dorm more likely,” Neli would scoff, before he’d burst, waving the bottle in his hand: “A joke? Ungrateful and entitled brats, at least you’ve got a roof over your heads.”
The elevator puffed and groaned like an old man on his deathbed, Neli rubbed her forehead to remove unwanted thoughts. One more day and she would be out of here. One more day and Neli would be back again with her mother whom she’d left at home, in their little village in the mountains.
The elevator grunted closer.
Squinting her eyes, Neli checked her mother’s wristwatch - 18:06. Radu must have already arrived. She put her right foot forward - never the left
one, not since she did when she found her father breathless in his bed when she wasn’t even twelve. Her shoulders trembled to release the icy feeling in her back at the memory of that early morning of December. She wrapped the scarf tighter around her neck, massaging the cement floor under her feet to bring some warmth into her bones. And yet, as the doors were gaping with a tired squeak, Neli was still shaking when her foot stepped into nothingness.
And then she squealed, a squeal she’d never even heard before, as she tumbled, collapsing to the bottom of the shaft. A thump followed like a shovelful of dirt at the bottom of a tomb.
Then silence, only silence filled the air.
Moments or maybe hours later, Neli groaned, her eyelids fluttering in search of light. She squirmed, her body shivering with cold, but her right arm had been pinned to the ground by a long metallic pole. It was a gentle touch along her left hand that brought the senses back into her skin. So light, like her mother’s soft caress when she’d wake her up every morning before school.
Mama, Neli tried to speak, the warm touch edging up her arm.
Tata, she tried this time, but still no words were coming through her lips. Who was she calling? Her father was dead; the thought sent shivers down her back.
Then who was brushing her coat now up her arm, over her chest, slowly breathing in her face? Mama, she mumbled fidgeting onto the floor when a sharp pain in her lower lip made her body shiver, followed by the shriek of a rat dashing up across her forehead, its nails and paws tangling deep into her hair.
Neli squealed and squirmed onto the ground, wavering her arm above her head, until her fingers pushed it free together with a clump of hair. She could still hear the squeaks piercing through the heartbeats in her chest. Ears perked, she waved her hand around her in the darkness, until the heavy silence filled the air again. The rat was gone. For now, at least.
“Heel-,” Neli slipped a faint groan, then she licked the droplets dripping from her lower lip onto the chin. She forced her left hand to the back of her neck that was pulsing as if nails had been nailed into her head. She groaned again when her fingers touched the gooeyness that was leaking from her skull.
“Heel-,” Neli tried, then perked her ears, as faint voices were coming from the stairwell.
She tried to move her feet, but a sharp pain blitzed from toes to head.
“Help,” the word finally took form.
She perked her ears again: the silence of a half-abandoned dorm.
“Heelp,” the sounds came louder, bouncing off the concrete walls.
Would Radu even notice she was gone? Why would he? Not like he knew her. Although Neli knew everything about the third-year drama student with dimples in each cheek and red curls flowing to his shoulders. The boy who’d make her blush every time she’d see him through the gaping door on her way back to her room. The waiter who’d make her heart race faster every Sunday evening in the Students’ Pub around the corner, where she’d read her book, savoring a cup of tea.
“Help,” Neli squirmed into the dirt but sharp needles were piercing through every patch of naked skin. Her head was pulsing even when she tried to blink.
“Heel-,” Neli’s mouth opened, but the sounds were trapped inside her throat. And who would even hear her? Everyone she knew had already gone home for the Christmas holidays.
“Hee - ” Sounds gurgled from her mouth like the water in the pipes rusting in these dying walls.
Was she dying here as well? Was this concrete pit her tomb?
No, she could not die here. Not when she wasn’t even twenty. Not before she would have lived. Not before she would have loved, nor before she
had been kissed. Not before she’d done the things she’d dreamed of as a kid. She left so she could live the life her mother never lived, Neli promised when her mother squeezed her cheeks between her calloused palms right before she left for Bucharest.
“Ma-ma,” Neli groaned. Behind her trembling eyelids, her mother smiled, a pair of sky-blue eyes gazing softly into Neli’s eyes, her hair waving down her shoulders like liquid gold against the tar-like dress she’d always wear. The only color Neli’s mother had been wearing since her father passed over seven years ago.
“Ma-,” Neli screamed, but all her throat released was just a murmur.
Her chest softly rising, Neli felt the cement floor where rough gravel and sharp shards had pierced deep under her fingernails. And yet, there was such warmth and softness in that touch.
Mama.
She clasped her fists to cling onto the softness in her hand, while foreign fingers were gently pinching on her face. Just like her mother used to pinch her chubby cheeks before she covered them in kisses.
Tata.
My little warbler, her father used to call her whenever little Neli jumped onto his lap, arms wrapped tightly around his neck.
Ta-ta.
Her body shivering with cold stopped shaking, as the warmth was spreading in her chest and limbs, until the skin was burning on her face.
My little warbler, rest your head against my chest.
Taa. Taaah.
*
Bucharest, December 2022
“Is anyone there?” Nora clasps the receiver in her hand. “Hello?!” Her pitch goes higher than she would have liked.
“I am”
“Is this a bad joke? Who is this?” Nora holds her breath to listen to the wheezing on the phone. “Leave the girl alone -” she starts again after a pause, when a voice goes hissing, “I am the girl eaten by rats,” followed by a laughter into Nora’s ear.
Employee of the Year
Paul Moriarty
Originally from Canada, Paul Moriarty has lived and taught in central Europe for over two decades. His fiction has appeared in Typishly and WestWord. He’s just completed his first short story collection, Watch Like Nobody’s Dancing.
When Henry had been at the Copperwood Inn for about a year and a half, he learned that calls that came from room 405 were unlike any others Front Desk received. They would invariably frustrate his co-worker, Millicent, to no end, and so he strove to be the first to answer when the number appeared on screen. The room, it should be known, hadn’t seen a guest in over twenty years! A burst pipe had apparently left so much water damage that the manager at the time decided to convert the space into a muchneeded storage area for such things as surplus linen and the Copperwood’s legendary Christmas decorations. The room’s telephone had also been removed in the conversion but, as Henry discovered, calls from that room continued to come anyway.
There had been a few baffling calls in his first year on the job but the day he really cottoned on was when he and Millicent had been working a fairly slow shift on a Saturday afternoon. “I have no idea what this gentleman is playing at, but I’m seriously not in the mood,” said Millicent, whose moods, as long as Henry had known her, had never actually seemed to be all that accommodating. “He says that if he’s paying ten dollars a night, he should at least expect a functioning shower!”
Henry took the phone and lowered his voice, straightening his tie unconsciously. “Sir,” he said, turning away from Millicent, “this will sound like an odd question but it’s more for me than you. What year is it?” The man’s reply was less than polite but confirmed what Henry had begun to suspect. If the register from that time had been available, he would have seen that the very disgruntled Mr. Hayes, an honest-to-goodness travelling salesman, had occupied the room for three nights in October, 1960. As a conscientious employee, Henry also hoped that someone had fixed the man’s shower straight away.
The calls came very irregularly and Henry managed to field as many of them as possible. He learned to refine his questions, as in ‘the hotel would like to know what their guest thinks of the wallpaper.’ Elsie, who had been cleaning rooms for what must have been half a century, turned out to have an exceptional memory for detail and had been especially helpful when
he’d focused the questions on décor. Henry began their interviews by bringing her a folding chair when she was out back, enjoying the one cigarette she set aside for each day’s break. No one from Front Desk had ever so much as asked her opinion about cleansers or scheduling concerns and she was astonishingly happy to get off her feet.
Some callers seemed not to pick up on anything unusual and others helped him by simply making comments about the weather or local events. Admittedly, he wasn’t able to be much use when someone from 1955 asked what movies were playing in town, although he still made sure to treat every guest with the utmost respect and assumed his historical counterparts had been able to meet each of their needs.
Almost as soon as he realized that he had a conduit to the past, Henry began to pray that he could make contact with a guest that would help him to truly make a difference. Although he sensed that stopping 9/11 or an attempt on a politician’s life would be beyond his reach, he believed that he might be able to save the eleven whose names he had committed to memory in elementary school. Whatever was happening with Room 405 was obviously a gift and he resolved, to the best of his ability, to try and stop the event that had so darkened the city’s Wikipedia entry.
Finally, one day, a guest he’d asked about the wallpaper actually called back. It had been several months in Henry’s time but nothing about this system could be expected to make much sense anyway. It was not a quiet day at all and the early arrival of a tour bus was threatening to make things uncomfortably busy within minutes. When the room number appeared on screen, he took the phone into the back office, uncharacteristically leaving Millicent to handle the crowd alone. He felt her shooting him a resentful look but knew this was the kind of look she would fire at him anyway, whether he offered her a freshly-made coffee or mentioned how interesting it was that her name meant ‘strong in work.’ He had come to the conclusion that Millicent had an extremely finite collection of smiles to offer and, lest her hospitality diploma go to waste, she chose to dispense them to hotel guests rather than to humans she saw on a daily basis.
“Front Desk. Henry speaking. How may I help you?”
“Hello, this is Eden Waters from Room 405. I believe we just spoke.”
Although neither name was to be found on her birth certificate, Eden Waters had been carving out a niche for herself in the especially colourful neighbourhood she now called home. She was also, hands down, the favourite aunt of at least a dozen youngsters, both biological and chosen family, and divided her time between animal rescue and the used book store she had founded with a partner who now lived on another continent. “You’re in the future, aren’t you?” she said.
The wave of relief that Henry felt must surely have been palpable on the other end. “Um, yes, I don’t know how this is happening, but... thank you for recognizing it!”
“I’m an Aquarius with the Moon in Pisces. These kinds of things always happen to me.”
Henry had no idea what this meant but he was glad to finally have someone on the other line who understood what was going on, and whom he might enlist for his special project. He longed to ask Eden what she did for a living but he wasn’t about to let a trans-dimensional telephone call compromise his professionalism. Still, he dared hope that this encounter, whether by chance or fate, could change the corner of the world he knew best.
“And may I ask what year you’re calling from?” he said. “It’s 1981 here.”
Perfect, he thought. There was still a year to go. “Is there anything I can help you with at this end,” he said, “it’s more than 30 years later here.”
“Gosh, I don’t know. I’m mostly just kind of happy just to let things play out. I don’t care so much about flying cars but please tell me that there’s no nuclear war.”
“No, we’ve certainly had our problems but there hasn’t been one.”
“And I suppose it’s King Charles and Queen Diana now? They probably have grown-up children.”
“Oh yes, two boys and there are grandchildren too.” Henry thought he’d spare his new contact the other details, however interesting they might be, especially if he was going to move the topic towards his request.
As if sensing Henry’s purpose, Eden suddenly said, “I’m sorry for frittering away our precious time on such things, but it’s all that’s been in the news these days. Please, let me know...Henry, was it? what I can do for you.”
“Oh, Ms. Waters, I am so grateful you’ve asked. Do you know the area?”
“Well, I grew up here but moved away after college. I’m actually back for a class reunion.”
“Then you’re familiar with Memorial – I mean, Carroll Park?”
“Oh yes, there’s never been a better place for picnics. They also have that big craft fair every Lab our Day.”
“Exactly! Ms. Waters, do you have a pen and paper handy?” There used to be both on the bedside table and Henry imagined it was the same in the 1980s. When she answered in the affirmative, he had her take down the details of what was to happen the following year, the name of the gunman and even the shop where he worked on the weekends. Being the biggest and most horrific event in the area, Henry had grown up knowing the details and having the photographs of the eleven victims emblazoned in his mind. After he finished school, his parents confessed that some teachers had approached them about what they feared was a morbid obsession with the event on Henry’s part. Even as a small child, he could be found bringing flowers to the monument every Lab our Day weekend and would work it into numerous essay and projects, doing his part to
honour their memory. Now, he had been given a phenomenal chance. Even if Ms. Waters had little more than the phone book to work with, they could surely make things different.
“I will do all that I can to stop this tragedy,” said Eden. “I have a cousin in the police force and another at the library, so that’s a start.”
“I know it will be hard for anyone to believe us.”
“Don’t worry, Henry, I still have some time on my hands.”
“As soon as you’re finished tending to the guest’s needs,” said Millicent with all the warmth of a roadside parking lot in January, “the computer’s crashed again and the line-up isn’t getting any shorter.”
Henry never really got to help Millicent, however, and she, in turn, never got to shoot him any more withering glances.
Henry knew that his parents had met in the city in that fateful year but hadn’t known that it was the very day of the attack itself. Perhaps they hadn’t wanted him to associate their meeting with the tragedy, even if their happy years together were truly a testament to the good that can be found in the most terrible folds of history. His father had been working as a waiter then and his mother had just moved back to campus to start a new semester. She had been so distraught by the news that she left her dorm and went to the all-night cafe just to be around people and the sense of normalcy that was the sound of chatter and the clink of dishes. The gentle attention of the handsome young man in the green apron had been enough to spark something between them, a fact unknown to Henry when he made it his mission to save the eleven and all who had been touched by the horror of that day.
The universe, as its true challengers will tell you, sees simple plans as its favourite playthings. All at once, like increasing the light setting of a digital photograph, all of the lines and boundaries within Henry’s perception began to dissolve. Our hero panicked at first but he soon felt every fibre of
his being give way like bubbles. He was suddenly aware of one of his very first memories – a birthday party which included a machine for that seemingly magical purpose. More than any balloon-wielding clowns or brightly coloured paper, it was the bubbles that had made this party stand out in his rapidly-forming mind and, although the newfound pleasures of walking and speaking were occupying his days, it was the bubbles he’d longed to follow. He knew in his heart that, despite bursting so suddenly, they were heading somewhere mysteriously happy.
He loved his job and making people feel welcome and he even cherished his feeble attempts to make Millicent smile. He would miss his friends and family and the attic room he’d so lovingly filled with books and plants over the years. Even though he could no longer see or feel the fingers that had dropped the phone into its cradle, Henry felt curiously serene. He knew, without a doubt, that Eden’s efforts had saved the eleven and that he was now going to be in a place that was better than any he had ever known. There was no sadness in the bubbles and such was his reward.
Room 15
Jane L Wheeler
Jane L Wheeler grew up in Cadillac, Michigan where her parents owned a 16-room motel. This poem originally appeared in a chapbook from Celery City Press entitled The Pine Knoll Motel.
We are the only place that takes Daisy the Great Dane he lets sleep on the clean sheets of the second bed when he comes to peddle his assortment of hand forged tools pot hooks, knives, and fire place tongs to Wexford County’s hardware stores
For years he shod horses Percherons and Belgians their feet like dinner plates churning the fields for spring planting pulling logs from woodlot to loading deck until the hoof of some high class jumper nailed him broke his leg in two but truth be told he doesn’t mind likes molding metal to his will shaping the hot iron with hammer and anvil carting his wares the dog perched like a pony in the passenger seat
The Nice Hotel
MK Aisenberg
MK Aisenberg has a collection of poems, The Ether Dome, published with Main Street Rag in June 2024. After winning the James Hearst Award from Ilya Kaminsky, her title poem appeared in The North American Review and she has had poems in Carve, ONEARTONLINE, Ploughshares and The Agni Review. She works as a psychologist in Cambridge MA.
Mere steps from here my patient checks into a nice hotel in Harvard Square and lies down, wraps a plastic bag around her head and kills herself. Neatly. She’s a writer and has always been attracted to exploded countries where men torture each other, then sit with her for interviews on television.
With her wide eyes and red lipstick she looked a bit like me. But any tortured person can sense what she’s seen; a nun knows what animal drowns outside her convent moat.
Her mind was made of continents that broke apart at birth. The Americas. Africa. El Salvador.
She’s rung every small-town church bell of the truth. So many people would lie down, slip off their shoes and send a reassuring note to a friend Why is everyone so surprised?
I cannot tell you all I’ve seen she whispered the day before she died, but we ate soup made from our enemies. Clear bone broth, floating eyes, the sore muscle of the heart.
Freundinnen
Adriana Stimola
Adriana Stimola (she/her) is a literary agent, mother and writer. Her poetry has been featured in numerous publications, including the Santa Clara Review, the San Pedro River Review, Driftwood Press, Harbor Review and Soundings East. She was awarded an Honorable Mention in the New Millennium Writings 53rd poetry contest, and is the 2025-2028 Poet Laureate of West Tisbury, Martha's Vineyard.
In Germany I watched two women try to thread a needle, over a hotel dinner.
One woman finally made it through the eye, and rung the air with red nail polish and an invisible mallet then ordered a pinot noir.
The other woman set to sew the first one’s buttons back on her black leather trench coat, breathing like blowing the glass that might hold all the wine.
It’s from 1994. I thought I’d have to buy a new one—I have no time and I can’t sew. She sang laments of age and crooned of how the industry has changed.
The needle passed through coat and curses and a teary handshake deal. The buttoned-up leather lay hung on the sewer’s black walker.
Later, among the Americano runners, I heard whispers that she, and her jacket, would not be back next year.
Brothel Rooms and Butcher Shops
Preston Eddings
Preston Eddings has spent the last decade fervently studying the deep, inner workings of the latter half of a good drunk. While not much headway has been made to produce anything of intellectual or scholarly value, and finding no one willing to grant him a fellowship, he has dedicated himself to his work religiously, nonetheless. What follows is the fruit bared from intellectual depravity and the ramblings of an iconoclastic slut.
picking at the bones of whatever little love I was given in my childhood— now I’m in my thirties heaping spoonfuls of imitation love served in cheap Birmingham hotels and smoke-filled bars where old women, weathered and indifferent, await me; I’ll give her my number and forty minutes of my time to make up for time served in abusive and emotionally vacant marriages. maybe I’ll leave her with obscenities that would better suit her mind than the brothel rooms and butcher shops she’s leased to ex-lovers this is ours, our vulture’s romance.
Letter to the Housemaid
Lina Buividavičiūtė
Lina Buividavičiūtė was born on May 14, 1986. She is a poet and literary critic. Lina is author of two poetry books in the Lithuanian language. Her poetry is published in Matter, Masters and Proverse Poetry Prize anthologies, and the magazines: Drunk Monkeys, Beyond Words, The Dewdrop, The Limit Experience, Beyond Queer Words, Maudlin House, Cathexis Northwest Press, Poetry Online, Red Noise Collective, Sad Girls Diaries, as well as the Versopolis poetry platform. Upcoming publications include New Millennium Writings, Cathexis Northwest Press, Red Noise Collective, The Stardust Review and Beyond Words.
The best part about traveling is hotels. Their pale anonymity and the law of silence. The rag and brush and dusts obey other hands. My hair in the sink, menstrual blood on the sheets, coffee stains on the pillow and a humble maid –no obvious frustration, no accusations –just “yes” and “now”, this quiet service for my convenience.
The cleanliness of the toilet speaks of the housewife – I am happy to forget this rule when I travel.
The cleanliness of the toilet speaks of the housemaid – I am happy to accept this rule when I travel.
And sometimes I try to imagine her thoughts. Housemaid looks at the evidence of my miserable being. My dirty linen, dark red lipstick on the edge of a glass of wine. Humble maid, What do you think about my despair, about these small tips and signs of my life I have left so carelessly?
In her dreams, she smiles at my face and goes to clean other rooms. There is no time for positive thoughts, manifestations or the deep secrets of life. Just rag, brush, silence.
