The hotel is a place without time. There are no clocks in the casino, no windows. Fruit machines spin and flash, lemon, lemon............orange. The woman who has been feeding the slots with all the care and desperation of a cuckoo mother lets out a sigh. She sags for a moment, punctured, then starts to feed the machine again. There is a shriek of joy and a metallic avalanche of coins.
Now I stand with my forehead pressed against s a window I cannot open, breathing in desiccated, freeze-dried air that sends a flash of ice cream pain through my sinuses. In the bed behind me, his kind, office soft body breathes in and out. His mouth is slightly open, one arm thrown out into the space I have left beside him. has left. His clothes are neatly folded, wallet and watch on the night stand. On my pillow there is a smear of chocolate, two wilted rose petals. His kindness brings tears to my eyes. It makes me want to run.
There is a desert out there beyond the neon. The sun will rise soon, sending fingers of light, delicate as gold leaf at first, growing stronger as they stroke the Joshua trees. The shimmering heat will send coyotes to their lair, replete with the bodies of small nocturnal rodents. I rest my forehead against the triple glazing, imagining the heat on my skin, the smell of sagebrush and mesquite. Imagine filling my pockets with desert roses and small bleached bones. I see myself stringing tiny white teeth onto a necklace and dancing, howling under a full moon.
Two hours until the transfer to the airport. Two hours when we will be kind to each other, both pretending there was never a red velvet box tucked away in his hand luggage.
Karen Arnold is a writer and child psychotherapist. She came to writing later in life, but is busy making up for lost time. She is fascinated by the way we use narratives and storytelling to make sense of our human experience. She won the Mslexia prize for flash fiction in 2022 and was placed second in the Oxford Flash Fiction competition in 2023 She has work in The Waxed Lemon, The Martello, and Seaside Gothic amongst others. She can be found on twitter @aroomofonesown_4
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