The motel sat squat and lonesome in the middle of nowhere, like a bad idea that couldn’t quite die. Pull over those shotgun thoughts, she’d said, her voice thin as cigarette smoke, half-love, half-warning. In the backseat, a wisp of a memory stirred—bodies colliding like busted stars, creamy petals dropping one by one onto cheap upholstery. The slap of reality had come later, sharp as a motel key left unclaimed at the desk.
Inside, the jukebox wheezed out its eternal last rites to broken men, women, and jukeboxes. Black coffee steamed in the booth, untouched. She stared past it, past him, past everything. He’d tried "I'm sorry," tried it on a napkin, in a thousand different intonations, but the words were as empty as her half-lidded eyes. Drunken pleas didn’t move her anymore. Deep down we don’t change, she’d said once, tracing a cigarette burn on the table. He hated that she might be right.
The fears swam in his head like rats in the pool out back—too filthy to save, too stubborn to drown. Every motel had them: rats, ghosts, people like him. The long drives didn’t help, the sleeping pills didn’t help. Family therapy was a joke they didn’t laugh at anymore.
Outside, the desert was a ******’s heartbeat, long and taut, waiting to pull the trigger. No welcome home here, no open arms. Sacrifices made, yes, but not counted. That was the rule. He felt the morphine blues of goodbye coming, their ugly melody too hard to respond to. Wish you were here, his mind whispered, but the words were jagged and broke apart before they reached his lips.
After dark, the days of handovers and cheap dreams faded into something worse: the truth. On our deathbeds, maybe we all regress. Memories stay young at the moment of disaster. He imagined her stepping away from tomorrow's drama, just far enough to let the edge of her dress brush against it.
“Help the invalid,” she’d said once, her voice sticky with mockery. Was that him now, the invalid? Maybe. He didn’t answer her then, and she didn’t wait for it. She never waited.
He lit a cigarette, setting fire to everyday troubles, or at least pretending to. The creamy petals were all gone now. Only the thorns remained, brittle and unforgiving.
Some prose.