The Stardust Inn had no sails of silk.

The wooly sheets chafed his sunburnt face. He couldn’t sleep with all those demons glaring at him. The ***** maids never washed the blankets and they stank like dead goats. Nobody ever cleaned his room, or bothered to replace the soap, or replace the dead lightbulbs, or fix the faulty ceiling fan.

The potpourri made the goat smell worse, somehow.

Dead goat. Dead flowers. Dead people. Dead tired.

It was hard to mend a broken soul, surrounded by such paper-thin walls. He’d lay listening to men and women shuffle horizontally, sweating and thrusting themselves raw beneath the scratchy sheets in the bed next door.

A cockroach scurried away across the carpet, over the bare foot of the Ghost where it sat crooked upon a chair in the dark. He always wanted to tell that Ghost, if it’d just fix its posture it might get some rest – but instead, never said anything at all.

The woman next door out-moaned the wind. He looked up at the Ghost, and the Ghost at him with large black eyes. He could almost hear that tortured spirit say;

“Now you know what I’ve had to deal with.”