The Motel
Jesse Millner
For years you’re in love, coasting along, and then you are not, coasting. You’ve washed up on a beach somewhere and dead fish stink up the shore in a northern place beyond any sadness where you wish you spoke Inuit because they must have a word for the cold miles beyond the flickering headlights where the cursive vacancy glows pinkly from the parking lots of motels. You’ve stayed at those places. There’s always a bad painting of a lake with bobbing boats and a blue mountain in the background hung over the bed, like a scene inviting you to climb through the canvas and dunk yourself in the cold water, and it must be cold because the trees are tinged orange and red–yes, it’s autumn in the picture, with winter closing in. In the top drawer of the fake maple nightstand, you know there’s a Gideons Bible but you’re afraid to read Revelation, so instead you imagine a less dramatic ending of your world in which you simply fall asleep on the floral bedspread and never wake up.
But you do wake up. Have a cup of coffee as the light rushes in through a dramatic picture window that is, indeed, almost a painting itself of a two-laned road with semis hauling trailers and hauling ass toward distant Walmarts and Best Buys.
How is it that you’ve ended up at a broken-down motel where it’s started snowing and the traffic swishes through the moistening streets? You sip coffee and linger like a person waiting for a sign from a prophet or psychic or even the motel manager you met last night through clouds of smoke. She told you the ice machine was broken. She spoke with an accent that reminded you of fisherfolk from New England. Her teeth were brown from years of cigarettes and her hair was breaking loose from a ponytail’s rubber band and somewhere music played, Barry Manilow’s “Mandy,” who came and gave without taking, unlike this life, which has arrived again and again and taken everything, or at least that’s what it seems like in the gloom of this small room poised, like everything else, on the edge of eternity. What kind of name is Mandy? you ask but the only answer is the music of the highway, the high-pitched squeals of steel belted radials holding on to asphalt–for dear life.
Jesse Millner
For years you’re in love, coasting along, and then you are not, coasting. You’ve washed up on a beach somewhere and dead fish stink up the shore in a northern place beyond any sadness where you wish you spoke Inuit because they must have a word for the cold miles beyond the flickering headlights where the cursive vacancy glows pinkly from the parking lots of motels. You’ve stayed at those places. There’s always a bad painting of a lake with bobbing boats and a blue mountain in the background hung over the bed, like a scene inviting you to climb through the canvas and dunk yourself in the cold water, and it must be cold because the trees are tinged orange and red–yes, it’s autumn in the picture, with winter closing in. In the top drawer of the fake maple nightstand, you know there’s a Gideons Bible but you’re afraid to read Revelation, so instead you imagine a less dramatic ending of your world in which you simply fall asleep on the floral bedspread and never wake up.
But you do wake up. Have a cup of coffee as the light rushes in through a dramatic picture window that is, indeed, almost a painting itself of a two-laned road with semis hauling trailers and hauling ass toward distant Walmarts and Best Buys.
How is it that you’ve ended up at a broken-down motel where it’s started snowing and the traffic swishes through the moistening streets? You sip coffee and linger like a person waiting for a sign from a prophet or psychic or even the motel manager you met last night through clouds of smoke. She told you the ice machine was broken. She spoke with an accent that reminded you of fisherfolk from New England. Her teeth were brown from years of cigarettes and her hair was breaking loose from a ponytail’s rubber band and somewhere music played, Barry Manilow’s “Mandy,” who came and gave without taking, unlike this life, which has arrived again and again and taken everything, or at least that’s what it seems like in the gloom of this small room poised, like everything else, on the edge of eternity. What kind of name is Mandy? you ask but the only answer is the music of the highway, the high-pitched squeals of steel belted radials holding on to asphalt–for dear life.