The Corridor Where Jennifer Was Packed
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The hotel corridor had been carpeted yesterday. Now it was linoleum, slightly warm, and the doors were closer together. She counted her steps between 214 and 215: seventeen, then twelve, then eight. The ice machine hummed a frequency that made her teeth remember being baby teeth. She had not checked in. She had never learned to drive. The keycard in her pocket bore a photograph of the back of her own head. On paper, she was Jennifer Emery. Her home number was that of a house in Herniman. Her cell-phone number was out of service for lack of minutes.
Between 102 and 103, she lingered in a perfectly lit room several sizes too large and watched the keys on the desk slide. She could’ve been anyone. If she was who she really was, then who was Norman Whitaker?
Beatrice, for her part, had never been away from home. Ever. Too big to carry, and too small to truly affect the balance of any groaning plane or unmanageable train, she got packed more than swaddled before she was rolled down the airplane aisle. Her first words had been Thank you. Beatrice never unrolled herself, but if she could, she would’ve done so easily in the sunshine, puddling out beneath a silverwood tree that wasn’t the exact one where the arm of love had been sewn back on. This might be her chance, as Norman didn’t often rent hotel rooms and, Sensation aside, it was dark. In her own clothing, at 41, she might fool a maid, tell the executive assistant she must’ve been pulled from the water, that the body in Norm’s was just the arm of her McGunnis Rose necklace: perfectly pitched amethyst on a creamy-swirl silverwood arm like seedheads from the shade of a summer breeze.
Locking herself in the tight space between 102 and 103, she stretched out her shimmering body and disappeared.
How Normal was it? she thought as she rendered herself adrift. He wasn’t yet on her pillbox, but his tweed blazer was. She had never been. She reappeared in Claridge’s.
Closing the door, as she had been his wife for centuries and people would be tasked to read more than one position between 102 and 103, she stumped along the mirror-lined corridor. The ice machine was useless.
Norman smiled. A confused smile. This would happen when she made the girl dissolve, but she wiped it differently off this time,
behind one eye, as if tears had poured them. Could she recall correctly? she asked him. In the dream, she’d recorded, “How normal was it?” but it was hard to think in. Especially when it was about sucking a sock.
Perching on the edge of the side table, she rested her head against his chin.
The telephone essence responded, soothing him unlike the words which Morse-code-stamped his vitals, She shook her head, her own hair reflecting off his head.
Norman looked at a yellow folder on the desk like it was a skull.
It reads◆ About the ending
❧ About the title