Tom was sitting on the edge of his bed at the Hope’s View Inn, a two-story motel that looked as inspired as its name would suggest. He was staring at the no signal page on his phone’s browser and playing a consolation game where a minimally pixelated cowboy had to run, jump, and duck over obstacles through the desert. Scattered around the floor of his room were wrappers from the off-brand chips and snack cakes he had been living on all day courtesy of the first-floor vending machines. As if being stranded wasn’t bad enough, most businesses in town had closed as residents and guests alike tried to figure out what the hell their captors meant by quarantine. Were they sick? Was it a new strain of Covid? Did they need to stay in their homes? Social distance? After getting his little pixelated cowboy killed for what he decided would be the last time, he tried again to refresh the page. The gesture struck him as a sort of symbolic digital burial. Once again, he got the no service message and the prompt that would set the immortal cowboy running again. No afterlife for the cowboy.
Tom looked up towards the big front window of his room and could see a sliver of the hazy light of dusk through the crack in the curtain. He got up, walked to the window, and pulled the curtains apart, flooding his room with the setting sun. He was overlooking the second-floor walkway, which was so tight that the motel staff’s cleaning carts could barely squeeze through, and the motel’s outdoor swimming pool which had been vacant all day. Tom looked up and took in the vanguard of the night sky as it pierced through what was left of the daylight. Tom had always loved this moment, where the first stars began to show, as if lending their light so the sun could rest for a little while.
Tom was in his junior year of college, trying to turn his lifelong obsession with the cosmos into a career by studying astrophysics. After an especially grueling Spring semester, Tom had decided to reward himself with a road trip in the early weeks of summer. His destination was California, with a few stops in Nevada to see the stars beneath the desert sky. The first stop was the town of Hope’s View. It didn’t have to be. Hell, even if it did, he could have waited one more day like his mom had suggested. Had he humored her, he wouldn’t have arrived at Hope’s View until early afternoon today. Assuming he didn’t hear any news alert telling him not to bother trying, he’d have arrived on the other side of the barricade where he would have been turned away by the men in their yellow coats. He would then stop for lunch an hour or two down the road at a family diner, where he would read all about what was happening to the poor bastards in town as he looked up motels at his next destination. Instead, he was one of those poor bastards.
He had spent all day cursing his luck, but as he stood at the window looking up at the familiar beauty of the burgeoning stars, he couldn’t deny that they felt somehow new to him as they shone above the town. Then, a splash of water from the pool caught his eye. He looked down as a woman emerged from the rippling water. Tom thought that she was around his age or maybe even closer to her mid-twenties. She wore a bright yellow bikini that reminded him of the daisies he saw around town on the drive in. Her hands moved up to her top, which she was adjusting with her hands as she stood waist deep in the water. Tom didn’t mean to stare, but that wasn’t enough to stop him. She was beautiful, with shoulder length blonde hair that was pulled back in a messy ponytail, and colorful tattoos on her shoulders that Tom couldn’t make out. He thought about how a braver man might go down to the pool. He might yell, “Cannonball,” and plunge into the water, and her life. He’d come up from the splash laughing, the sound of his voice winning her over. Tom had gotten so lost in this thought that he hadn’t noticed the woman had taken notice of him staring and decided to return the favor. As it dawned on him that the two were staring directly into each other’s eyes, he slowly made out her dumbfounded expression and her slow, “can I help you, perv,” wave. Tom instinctively grabbed the curtains and drew them shut, his heart pounding as he waited for angry fists to pound against his door. But they never came, and for as much relief as Tom felt as he sank back into his bed, ready to send the cowboy off on yet another doomed run through the desert, he felt disappointment in equal measure.
Hotel for Ghosts 