by Tiffany Palumbo
| He leaned against the hotel door, wide open to let in the summer air, and flicked his cigarette onto the walkway. The parking lot streetlamps filled the room with jaundiced light. Anybody who walked by would see me, naked as he had left me, splayed on the bed, trying to look nonchalantly sexy. The room reeked of cigarettes—fresh and stale—and sex—our hormones and sweat soaking into years of hormones and sweat that had already seeped into the fake wood paneling and 1970s furniture. He was looking through me again. I felt naked and vulnerable under his gaze in a way that was deeper than skin. I broke his gaze, and looked out the window instead: it overlooked the walkway he was half-standing in. Cracked concrete bordered on one side with spindly iron railings that shrieked and shifted when you leaned against them. They were bound by broken rusted screws that hadn’t provided any secure fastening for at least a decade. Still, the illusion was complete enough to deter any sticky-handed road trip brats from diving over the edge and spilling the contents of their soft skulls onto the parked cars and tarry asphalt below. The hotel property ran parallel to the enormous concrete artery of I-5, stretching north and south farther than most would ever go, disappearing behind the same broken hills of dead bottlebrush and wheatgrass and wild rye and foxtail barley it cut through. Pinpricks of light arrived continually in pairs, growing in size and hissing louder and louder until they passed, each pair carrying couples, truckers, and sleepy families on their way home from sweaty, miserable family vacations they wish they’d stayed home from. Thin wire fences leaned on either side of the road, stopping nothing but dispassionate travelers and the occasional sullen cow. Beyond the cracks and shrieking metal and bug-crusted cars lay the silhouettes of the shattered Klamath mountains—pitch against jet, gaping voids swallowing the night sky. Immutable in my lifetime, geologically ephemeral. He was still staring, leaning against the stone gray door, the paint-chipped edges revealing layer upon layer of ivory, hunter green, salmon. “What is it?” “I like looking at you.” I looked down at myself, my body stretched out on the bed. I was pretty in the moonlight: thin from starving after the divorce and pale from a lifetime spent in the Pacific Northwest. My milky thighs curved and widened into ample hips, which, in turn, narrowed to my waist and curved along my stomach before rising steeply into the soft mounds of my breasts. My skin was luminescent. For once, I saw the beauty in my own body—the way he saw it. This place was exactly where I wanted to be. I was in a scene from some black-and-white French movie that never got off the ground, and I enjoyed it. I knew I would never have this again: the perfection of this moment. Soon, I would lose it forever. We would pack our toothbrushes, our shampoo, our clothes still stinking with hormones and the sweat of the long car ride, and run one last check for forgotten items (always there would be one more), then close the door behind us and leave the bubble. Hours later, the cleaners would come—an underpaid, middle-aged woman, perhaps, with hands aged too quickly from years of bleach and scrubbing. She’d pull out her frosted plastic bottle of lemon- scented cleanser and scrub away the passion and contentment from the previous night. A new couple would move in or maybe a family, kids jumping on the bed and the parents ignoring each other with the help of the boxy CRTV on top of the dresser, oblivious and incapable of capturing the excitement that filled the room only hours before. Then they would leave and someone else would come, and another, and still yet another after that. The ugly flower bedspread I laid on would be washed and used in one of the rooms downstairs, the thin, cigarette-burned sheets we covered ourselves with would be moved to the room next door. Every day, a little bit of us would be purged from the room, turning it into just another tacky roadside hotel with threadbare carpet and a neon sign blaring to potential visitors: “VA ANCY.” A part of me would forever hold us there, frozen in place, immutable and in love in a cheap roadside hotel room. Making love, laughing, smoking, watching the moon sink below the horizon as the sky paled, falling asleep for a few peaceful hours, for once allowing someone to hold us close, despite the sweat beading on our hot summer bodies. Listen to Hotel Cigarettes here |
Tiffany Palumbo is a Ph.D. student studying creative nonfiction at Florida State University.
When she is not writing, she can usually be found sharing pictures and stories of her three cats,
whether you like it or not. More of her work can be found at TiffanyPalumboWrites.com.
When she is not writing, she can usually be found sharing pictures and stories of her three cats,
whether you like it or not. More of her work can be found at TiffanyPalumboWrites.com.