Elm Motel

We all live in the Elm Motel, next to the round-a-bout. Visitors come and go, but they always leave, back to nice big houses with backyards. We don’t. Each one of us has a small, striped room, with a small bed, and a yellow carpet. The glass of our windows, when they break, fall in jagged strips. Two of us have a little girl and she coughs all night and she never leaves the bed, so we sleep on the floor. She goes again, now, and we all listen because the walls are thin like paper. We hear the dry heave, and some of us wish she would just die because we can’t sleep, because all night is just hem, hack. Others feel bad, but a few don’t care at all. She stops, maybe just for a moment, so we all take a breath. Those of us closer to the round-a-bout focus on the sounds of the cars because we’ve lived here so long, we can tell the difference between them. Three of us argue in whispers whether the last car was a truck or a sedan, and the one of us holding a lit cigarette on the patio next door yells that it was a truck. 

We start to worry when the silence stretches farther than we’ve heard before. She should be coughing by now, surely, and we debate quietly in our identical bathrooms while we brush our teeth and shower and ignore the smell of mold. One of us lays in our bed, happy, deciding she has died, and convinced the motel is better for it. We chatter in our pajamas, naked, together, alone, and we call our mom because we wonder if we should just go over there and see if everything is okay. Two of us get the courage and start to walk down the balcony in our shower shoes because of the many cigarette butts and candy wrappers, but we stop halfway, biting our nails, unsure. We go back to our room.

It’s become unbearable by this point. We press our ears against the notebook sheet walls, but there’s nothing except the bump of our hearts, which begins to hurt, like a hammer, like someone is hammering the insides of our bodies. We tell each other to go check, no you check, and we shove each other and giggle until we remember why we’re arguing at all, and our stomachs drop. Four of us meet in the hall, murmuring, buzzing around like insects, wishing we could fly through the many cracks in her door just to check that, maybe, she is okay. We tell each other not to be a bother, we say everything is fine, and we yell that nothing is fine because, jesus, shouldn’t she be coughing by now? Be quiet, we say, and we hover by the door. 

The bravest of us trembles, lifting up a hand covered in liver spots to knock on the door. We clump together outside, and inside we hold our daughter’s hand because she stopped breathing hours ago, and those of us outside pound the door because we can’t help it and we don’t know there’s a dead little girl in there. We peek through the dollar bin curtains that hang crooked in front of the windows, and we see the two of us inside, huddled over a mass—is that—no, no, we say, frowning. We stare until our eyes hurt, and then we go back to our rooms, our palms burning, like we squeezed lemon juice into the cracks. A few of us pass a cigarette back and forth. We cough. It breaks the silence like window shards, and one of us throws the butt into the motel pool, where it sinks to the bottom.