by Maryn Anderson
February 3rd
6:17AM
I wish she’d stop trying to kill that fly. She’s never going to get it. It’s not her fault, after all, she’s armed only with an old dish towel, and the fly has the advantage of being anywhere in this entire restaurant. But despite that, it seems to be content just wavering around the front counter, like it’s taunting her on purpose. Even if she managed to hit it, the dish towel alone probably wouldn’t even take it out. Maybe she’s doing it more in the hopes of causing an annoyance, but it doesn’t seem to be working. I want to tell her to just give it up, but I can’t. She looks too nice. Too old and too nice for me to not secretly hold out hope that she’ll make it.
I’m eyeing up the ancient coffee machine as if I’m trying to cruise it. It’s the kind that’s so old it still has a backlit picture of some coffee beans on it and crusted over once orange and green lights. I’m watching the spouts drool out black sludge into the pots below, and I can grip the formica in front of me until my fingers turn white that’s how excited I am. Driving for 36 hours straight does that to you, I guess. The funny thing is, I know it’ll taste like shit. Even from my spot across the counter it smells burnt. I can’t tell you why I want it so badly, I just do.
Her eyes focus in, her hand draws back, and there’s a hard thwap against the counter as she slams the dish towel down, leaving behind a faint grease mark on the counter. I don’t see the fly, but I hear a faint buzzing in my left ear. She missed, again, and I feel bad. She had looked so proud, so determined to kill this thing.
I don’t know why I decided to go driving. I was given a week off of work, and I guess I just couldn’t think of anything better to do. I just started in one direction and kept on going.
I like driving at night a lot better. I know a lot of people don’t, and I can’t blame them. Not only is it harder to see, but there’s a different energy to nighttime drivers than daytime ones. They drive with more ambition as if the surrounding darkness has stripped away some fundamental aspect of human togetherness and empathy. People are tired and they want to get to where they’re supposed to be. They cut you off and honk at you when you go too slow and they couldn’t care less that you feel the exact same way.
I’d spent the night driving through the hills of northern New Jersey. Don’t ask me how I ended up there, I couldn’t even tell you. I only knew where I was because of the signs. I watched the hills stretch out before me, how they disappeared and reappeared only never in quite the same way. Maybe at night human togetherness is stripped, but it’s replaced by this sense of raw individuality. You never feel alive in the way that you do when you’re driving at night. Think of every touch, every orgasm you’ve ever felt at the hands of someone else, and that doesn’t even begin to encompass the feelings of life that you get from driving at night.
Maybe I should’ve been a trucker. I thought about it when I was younger, but I thought about it in the way that little kids think about becoming president of the moon or something stupid like that. I don’t know why. I mean, I had to know that they were real people, truckers, so I don’t know why I never made the logical connection that it was something I could do. I read once that truckers mostly drive at night because there’s less traffic. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But the idea of sitting 15 feet up, looking over the lights on the road, it just excites me.
She sets my coffee down on the counter, and I gladly take it. Without thinking, I gulp some of it down. I was right, it does taste like shit. But it feels amazing, like sitting next to a fireplace in the winter. Even if it tastes like dirty hot water. It’s like that joke about bad coffee and having sex in a canoe, it’s fucking close to water.
She asks me if I want any breakfast. I ask her if I can get two eggs over easy and some well done rye toast.
“You want the eggs well done?” she asks. I shake my head. No, I say, the toast. She nods and smiles and walks back into the kitchen.
I like places like this. Small breakfast places where there’s a small window that lets you see into the kitchen. They feel comforting somehow. There’s a cook behind the window. He has these swelled arms, not the kind that makes him look like he’s taking steroids, but the kind that just naturally is like that. I bet he doesn’t even work out. There’s a mustard yellow bandana tied firmly around his forehead, but with the thin sheen of sweat I can see covering his skin from here it’s like putting a bandaid on a laceration. In the back left pocket of his jeans is a matching bandana. Huh, I never would’ve guessed.
The waitress brings out the food, and I ask her if she knows of any motels nearby. I could just easily look it up on my phone, but I want to ask her. She tells me the only one she knows about is ten minutes down the highway. She says she’s never stayed there, but she’s heard rumors and I might be better going to the hotel in the other direction. I assure her I’m fine.
“Young man like you, by yourself,” she warns, “just be safe, alright?” I thank her, tip 50%, and drive to the motel.
The small lobby smells like cigarettes, and there’s an overflowing avalanche of an ashtray on the countertop. When I get closer I look at the filters and see that they’re American Spirits. Gross.
The man behind the counter is short and has on a short-sleeved button-up that strains to cover his waist and seemingly permanent sweat stains underneath each arm. He looks up at me like I’ve interrupted something important.
“What you want?” he asks in an accent that I can’t place. I stutter out an explanation, hand over some cash, and then he hands me a key with instructions to bring it back before 10 AM tomorrow.
I’ve slept in my car before, so I have no idea why this time I was adamant about getting a motel. It would’ve just been cheaper to sleep in my car. Maybe I just really want a bed.
The room has two twin beds that reek of mildew. The bedspread is covered in bright red flowers that have pale yellow centers. I set my bag down and fall onto one of the beds, and the springs throw me back up about an inch or so in protest. Retaliation.
In the next room over I hear some shuffling and some murmured voices. They’re both deep, though I can’t tell if it’s two men or just people with deep-pitched voices.
I eye up the phone on the nightstand and debate whether or not to pick it up. Who would I even call? I think of a few names, but they all feel so far away that I can’t convince myself that it’s worth the effort.
I’m wondering when the last time I’ve seen a popcorn ceiling before this is when I hear it. It starts out as a dull banging noise, a hushed whisper from that other room. Then, a rhythmic thumping against the wall. It takes me an embarrassingly long time to realize that they’re fucking, and they’re fucking hard.
I sit up. Suddenly the coffee is sitting low in my gut and I can’t tell if I want to puke or shit it out. You know, this one time I… never mind. I don’t want to talk about that.
“Harder!” one of the voices says, and for a second I almost laugh at the overdone porno cliche of it until I’m sick again.
Suddenly, I don’t want to be here. I realize just how far I am from anything that I know. I step outside without grabbing my jacket so that the February cold burns my bare arms. I smoke a cigarette. I breathe in so fast and deep that I start coughing. When I gasp air in, it’s so cold that it shocks me. I spit against the concrete, and it’s full of phlegm and bubbles. I wonder if I’m dehydrated.
I go back inside and sit on the bed. I pull my legs up to my chest as I try and think of what to do next.
About the Contributor & Piece
Maryn Anderson (she/her) is an English major on the Teacher Education track. She has been writing essentially for as long as I can remember.
“The story I submitted is particularly interesting in that the original concept and what I ended up writing were entirely different, and the only similarity they shared was the opening scene taking place in a small breakfast diner (the one in the story is based off of one in my hometown that I was frequenting a lot at the time I wrote this). This story was also interesting because it required me to use a perspective that is so different from my own, which was a unique challenge.” – Maryn Anderson