Arrival

| ARRIVAL | DEPARTURE | JOURNEY | ORIGIN | DESTINATION |

She leans back and feels the door close behind her with a heavy click. She opens her eyes and, breathing in the nicotine-stained air, takes in the motel room: the torn fly screens and greasy windows; the carpet furrowed into paths (door to bed, bed to bathroom, bathroom to couch); the creeping stain on the cornice and ceiling; the industrial furniture flailing at domestic comfort.

She places her purse on the table beside the door then, reconsidering, removes from it the knife. It surprises her: perhaps she had forgotten she had it; perhaps it was a different woman who stowed it away. In the artificial dusk of the room, it is a beacon. She hurriedly smothers it in the anonymity of her handbag, casts her purse in behind, then drops it in a gap between the couch and wall. For now they, as she, will remain hidden.

The motel is an occult space, stuck, like the blinking clock radio, in a permanent witching hour. The attendant had, if anything, been merely distracted by her arrival, as though she were simply an interruption to his true (higher) purpose. He had dispatched her brusquely, with a cracked plastic keycard and a rote speech on check-out times that, as she, had faded into irrelevance as they mutually eased themselves away from the counter.

She sits down on the bed and stares deeply into the peeling floral wallpaper garlanding the pine panelling. Her body is tense and twisting, but her mind is resolutely blank. Here, in disrepair and neglect, she is, herself, occluded, illuminated only by the jaundiced street light, fading her into the pallor of the cheap, polyester sheets.

Here she is, then: step two. Finally hidden, finally irrelevant. Her mouth and brow tighten as her eyes glance quickly to and from the shadowed nook beside the couch. Finally (she sighs) dead.