Fleabag
The building was squat, wedged between two larger buildings.
The hotel was not very big by big city standards.
It was built for the low-income from the beginning,
for overnighters on budgets and migrants on the run.
It was located in a part of town that borders the skid
row section of the city, which housed the sidewalk campsites of the
inner-city homeless with their prominently splashed blue tarps; eco-
systems complete with flies, maggots, fleas, and roaches, grudgingly
sharing space among their human neighbors.
Over time the hotel grew dingier by the year, sat in fading paint and peeling stucco, and nurtured its menacing legend and lore along the way.
It became known as a place where serial killers and rapists found shelter; where drug addicts and street whores cut deals.
A place where shadows and ghosts mingled in dreary corners and where the living could not tell them apart.
Inside, here and there, bugs were stuck to walls and ceilings like skin tags where they had stopped and died abruptly, mostly out of hunger.
Phantom smells rose in the narrow hallways, recalling times when decomposing bodies in locked rooms scented the stuffy air with aromas of damp decay and rotting flesh.
The building was known as the Crystal Hotel and gave shelter to a species of humanity that most people were happy to avoid.
Dirt
The hall carpeting was home to dirt and
dust from exotic places around the globe,
drug in on the soles of shoes, boots, and sandals.
Pebbles from Morocco hid beneath the planter
in the lobby. Dust from the shores of the Red Sea
was embedded in the stairs leading to the upstairs
sections of the building brought there last week by
a man who found work washing dishes at the local
homeless shelter.
Dry mud from Guatemala was caked in the closet
of a room located on the 4th floor.
And there were blood-stained sand grains in the elevator
where they had fallen off a man’s boot. The blood had gushed
from the throat of a tourist who had run into a straight razor in
a dark alley in Vera Cruz on a moonless night in June.
He had been looking for a good time.
Inhabitants
The daytime desk clerk was a man who had been in prison for 20 years for a murder he says he did not commit. He obtained the job through an organization dedicated to the rehabilitation of ex-convicts. When the man wasn’t working he lived in one of the single rooms on the third floor and stayed mostly to himself.
As a hobby, he read the tarot to himself and used the deck to gain insights into the lives of people who came and went from the hotel.
One of the dwellers came by and stopped at the desk to check on his mail. The man had long greasy hair and wore a faded eyepatch. Flecks of dry blood were sprinkled on his boots along with grains of sand whisked away from Gulf Coast beaches. A perceptible cold radiated from him as if diffused from a chiseled block of ice.
“The world gonna end anytime soon?” he asked the clerk.
“Depends on who you ask.” The clerk knew who it was and did not look up from his spread. He looked over the cards as the one-eyed man stared down at him.
“I’m asking you,” said the man. “What do the cards tell you?”
“Rough,” said the clerk.
“Hell,” said the man, “I coulda told you that.” He turned and walked out the front door. It was too early to go to the mission for some cold soup and hard biscuits. Maybe he’d go to the park and panhandle for a while. Looked like it was going to be a sunny day.