Last Call
I despise hotel rooms above all other places. Even public restrooms or hospitals or really old houses aren’t as bad as all this. But then that’s why I’ve come here, isn’t it?
You think you can do whatever you want and just walk away, and I suppose that’s true for you. But it’s not true. Not for me. The places where we do our things, where we take our actions, they hold on to some small part of us. An echo. An imprint. Just as everyone we’ve ever loved gets to keep some piece of us that we have to leave behind when we go.
This cheery flowered bedspread was once wrapped around a corpse, only she was still alive when they tucked it around her. Everything she felt, every thought she had as she died is here. In the fabric. Between the threads. She had talked herself into feeling hopeful, had imagined an heroic rescue in the minutes before she died.
Everything I’ve brought with me is new, and carries nothing other than what I’ve put there. The room has two beds and I waiver a bit before choosing. I place my bag on the bed furthest from the door.
I was six or seven years old before I realized that other people can’t, or don’t, or just flat out refuse to see. To feel. It was a family vacation – Disney World – and I started screaming as soon as we checked into that great big hotel right there in the park.
It was the dog, you see. They’d left it. Years ago someone had forgotten their dog here, or abandoned it, one. It wasn’t the hunger or thirst that made me scream. It was the fear and loneliness, the confusion and despair that it felt as it died.
Someone frolicked with her lover right here in this room, in the bed furthest from the door. Here is where her hands were tied. Here is where she pressed her heels into the mattress. And although her relief and her joy are palpable, what overrides it all is the guilt. The shame. It tastes sour and dark, like rainwater sipped from a ditch. I cannot see the face of the lover who makes her tremble in ecstasy, just the husband who does not.
I unpack my bag and spread my meager belongings across the bed furthest from the door. Most of what I’ve brought is for comfort, not utility. Flannel pajamas and thick fluffy socks and gin – the kind that wants you to believe that it’s blue, except it’s only the bottle that’s blue. What’s inside is clear and cold. It tastes like snow and blooms in my belly like a flower. There’s a goddamn field of them in there now, budding and blooming and dying like time-lapse photography.
Places give up their secrets to me and I learned a long time ago to stop telling you about it. You don’t want to believe me because when you do it frightens you. I understand. It frightens me too. I’ve learned to live with it. The fear that was so keen and sharp inside me when I was six or seven and first felt that dog has turned dull and throbbing. A toothache of fear, so constant it is almost unnoticeable. I thought I’d learned to live with it.
I unzip the small pocket on the inside of my bag and extract the last item, the razor blades in their slick paper covers. I don’t know why I’ve brought so many. The gin has done its work now and I am tired. So tired.
Nicolas Papaconstantinou
Lovely piece of work, Cyn – Love the idea of places haunting people, and that final paragraph is haunting, too.
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