Mr. Hotel

July 19, 2010, by Homme De Sept-Iles

excerpt from another ongoing short story. this segment is called “Face to Face with Mr. Hotel”. there’s ice (yet sulphur) and hockey (yet evil) in the larger framework.

so. you want something? need

something?

he’s standing like a small, museum orator

he looks up at me

and i’m at the bottom of a small mountain

his tweed smells like mustard seed

i, uh.

yes, but not right now

i didn’t speak with him again

i found ways to listen to him instead.

mr. hotel didn’t have to but he never gave the town a reason. there was nothing that could be said against him. nothing true, anyway

so he was at events. at meetings. like a politician. and i found ways to lurk around despite my dirty hair and catalogue bike.

he knew, of course.

i’d memorize the words, the intonations. i learned to notice what he wore and what foot was forward. details as precisely as my fifteen years allowed me to notice

only once did i physically react to something he said. it was the way the words came together on the page. i felt ordinary at the moment he said them. it was only later, in my room, when i scribbled the words out and then re-wrote them more neatly that the words whispered.

the words nodded

i gazed at the oil-stained tennis ball on the floor near a sock.

i looked back at the page

“I’m here for as long as I want to be here. I alter nothing.”

my head was a cold hole. I felt an imprint on the back of my neck.