ISSUE ONE
January 23, 2024
The motel clerk must have seen some unsavory things in his time, because I barely had one foot inside and he was already suspicious. “No rooms by the hour,” he said. “I’m staying the night.” “Alone?” I glared at him, but didn’t answer. I knew what it looked like: I was eighteen years old, wearing too much makeup, and dressed like I’d just finished a shift at The Temptation Club. And he wasn’t wrong to be suspicious: I wouldn’t be alone. I slapped my credit card (shiny and new, fresh from the bank this morning) down on the desk. He grumbled a little but took it and clicked some keys on his ancient Dell. “I want room six,” I said, before he could finish. He surveyed me, even more distrustful now. The motel carpet was rough against my knees. I’d turned out all the lights, and the silence was so deafening my ears had conjured up a ringing sound to drown it. You came here for this, I told myself. I came here for this. I took a deep breath, and got started. “Emma?” I whispered into the black. There was no response. “Emma,” I tried again, more resolute this time. A uniquely thrilling kind of terror gripped me as I said it. The kind of fear that sends teenage girls at a slumber party into the bathroom to try and summon Bloody Mary. The kind that makes people want to skydive, or drive too fast on a winding mountain road, or fall in love with someone they shouldn’t. Eighteen is pretty young; I still thought fear was the next best thing to really feeling alive. The hotel room vibrated: heavy, black, and hollow. I waited. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for – a pale face in the dark, a boney hand on my shoulder, a threatening whisper in my ear? None of that sounded particularly appealing, and yet, the nothingness was worse. Was I really so irrelevant that she didn’t even feel the need to bother with me? A distant truck horn broke the stinging silence, and I knew I was alone. Reluctantly, I stood up in the dark and fumbled for the switch on the bedside lamp. The room filled with light. It happened then in an instant: as my irises contracted, as my eyes fought to adjust, I blinked and for one fraction of a second, the room was different. Not so different that I felt I was someplace else, but different enough that I knew I was some time else. The walls that had been sad beige were now covered in a geometric 90s wallpaper. The carpet was gone, replaced by laminate flooring. There was an ashtray on the nightstand, and a landline with a curly cord where my cell phone had just been sitting. And there, right there on the bed in front of me, was the battered, bloody corpse of Emma. She lay in a pool of dark red fluid on the comforter. She looked nothing like the photos I’d seen – she looked nothing like anything I’d seen. Her skull was smashed to bits, nothing more than an unrecognizable mass of flesh and bone and brain matter. The Sears lingerie she was wearing was ripped at the seams as if she’d tried desperately to pull away. The only part of her not covered in blood was her left hand, which was tied at the wrist to the bed frame above her head. The rest of her was destroyed. In that fractured second in which the room had shifted backwards in time, I stared down at her, and felt the horrible sensation that I was looking at myself. I blinked. The motel room was as it had been. My cell phone was on the nightstand. The bed was empty and neatly made. I ran into the bathroom and threw up in the tub. # Emma was my aunt, but I never knew her that way. To me she was just a ghost: a silent specter that haunted every facet of my life. I’d realized this around the age of ten, when an older cousin had tried to spook me by telling the story. For the kids in our family it was something distant and novel. Sad, of course, but only in the way you feel sad for people on the news to whom terrible things have happened. I never knew her, after all. But I knew the facts. She was my mother’s big sister. She liked Linda Ronstadt and denim miniskirts. She was murdered at age thirty, a week and one day before my mother gave birth to me. It took a while, in the way it often takes children a while to piece together the obvious, before I understood that Emma’s death had created my mother as I knew her. I wondered if things had needed to play out the way they had on a cosmic level. Maybe Emma and I were never destined to exist in a universe together, and in order for me to arrive she had needed to leave. If so, that made it my fault. And I wondered, often, what my mom would have chosen had she been given a choice: the baby she’d never met and hadn’t planned for, or the sister she’d never existed without. I felt like I knew the answer. I could hardly blame her for it. Still. It was hard not to harbor any resentment. It hardened inside me, crystallizing under the pressure of a lonely, desolate childhood, until it coalesced into a diamond. My rage turned into something precious and rare. It was the only currency I carried in the world, and I had no clue who I was without it. I spent it in the usual ways: I skipped school, wore slutty clothes. I quietly hoped that someone might scold me, but no one ever did. That morning, the morning of my eighteenth birthday, I had woken up to the sound of breaking glass. I found my mother on the kitchen floor with blood smeared on her hands and a broken bottle of vodka beside her. She didn’t notice me as I watched from the doorway while she picked at the shards of glass with shaky, bleeding fingers. When she’d gathered all the big ones, she dumped them in the trash and stumbled to the cabinet under the sink, not bothering to mop up the spilled alcohol that was seeping across the floor. I could smell it, sharp and violent in my nostrils. She opened a new bottle, took a swig, and turned to see me watching. “Happy birthday, baby,” she tried to say, but it was too slurred to comprehend. # The truck stop motel where Emma had been murdered was on the edge of my hometown, just off the interstate exit. You had to pass it to leave Topeka – so we rarely left Topeka. I’d been saving up the sixty dollars I needed for the room for the better part of a year. It was my birthday present to myself. I wanted to be near her. I wanted to see where it had all ended and begun. The bathroom came back into focus as I crouched over the tub and wiped my mouth. I blinked myself back into the present and repeated the mantra the school guidance counselor, Miss Terry, sometimes made me speak out loud: I am here. I am here. I am here. It hadn’t been my choice to start seeing her, but she’d grown on me a bit. I stood up and peered around the doorway. The motel room looked normal. The bed was empty. But now that I’d seen her, she was impossible to unsee. I could feel her there, and I knew she wasn’t leaving. I knew she never had. My phone buzzed, and the anxiety that always accompanied it flared up in my gut. Out ofs voskda. nweed more on ur wya h ome, read the text. Anger singed the inside of my throat like bile. I threw the cell phone on the bed, grabbed my keycard, and left the room. # The motel was on the north side of the truck stop. To the south, across the vast expanse of gas pumps, was a nameless diner with a neon sign that said FOOD. Emma had eaten her last meal there: a Denver omelet and a diet Coke. I read it in the police report. A bell on the diner door clanged as I walked in. I hesitated; the place was completely empty. Cracked vinyl booths, a long counter with a view into the kitchen, a silent jukebox no doubt filled with pre-Y2K country hits. And not a soul in sight. But she was here; I could feel her. “Anywhere you like, hon,” a female voice called from the kitchen, startling me. I took a seat in the booth farthest from the door. Through the window beside me, I could see the motel, the gas pumps, and the rows of parked semi-trucks waiting in the night. An older waitress with gray hair and hot pink lipstick approached the table. “Denver omelet, please,” I said, my throat dry. “And a diet Coke.” I watched her closely as if those words might trigger some reaction, but she simply scribbled it on her notepad. “Anything else?” I shook my head. She started to turn back to the kitchen, and I found I couldn’t help myself. “How long have you worked here?” I asked. “If you don’t mind me asking.” “Since before you were a twinkle in your mother’s eye, I bet. Why do you ask?” “You ever hear about a murder at the motel?” “Honey, which one?” She shook her head and gave me a sad, understanding sort of smile. “You be safe tonight. Girls in your line of work gotta be tough as nails.” I watched her walk back to the kitchen. # Over the course of my eighteen years, I’d spent a lot of time being angry. Angry with my teachers and my boss at the Spangles. Angry with the faceless man who’d murdered Emma. Angry with my mother, angry with myself. And angry with Emma. She was a victim, of course, but in becoming one she had created a lineage of victims just like her. It was hereditary; a genetic factor of suffering passed down through the maternal line. Her death was the hinge that my entire life swung on – and I’d never even known her. I left the lights off as I re-entered the motel room, my rage pulsing. I slammed the door. Instantly, the room began to spin. I felt my balance slipping and fell to my knees on the floor. A kaleidoscope of colors and images flashed before my eyes: The motel room, gutted and empty of all furniture. Crime scene tape across the doorframe. Police officers scouring the scene. Emma’s bludgeoned body on the bed. I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing I had never come, feeling like I might be sick again. “I am here,” I mumbled, hugging myself like a child. “I am here. I am here.” And then as quickly as it had started, everything stopped. I opened my eyes. The walls were decked out in dated geometric patterns; the landline with the curly cord was back beside the bed. But Emma was no longer as she had been. She was whole, and alive, and beautiful. She sat on the edge of the bed in her Sears lingerie, which looked charming and sexy without the blood. She was putting something carefully back into her wallet as if she’d taken it out for one quick look: a sonogram. The closest she’d ever come to the niece she’d never meet. She loved me. We had someone in common, and she’d loved me just for that. An echoey pounding came from the other side of the motel room door. Emma stood and went to open it. Just before she did, I blinked, and she was gone. The room was back to normal. I had spent so much time with my anger, and I felt its sudden disappearance like a phantom limb. I tried to call it back to me, but it was somewhere else. I sat down on the edge of the bed. I touched a finger to the bed frame where Emma’s wrist had once been tied. “Emma,” I said gently, “I am here.” My phone buzzed from somewhere between the bed frame and the mattress. I fished it out and read through a dozen or more increasingly frantic and misspelled messages from my mother. The most recent one just said: Need u. I typed back: I’m here.
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Contributors:Penelope Amara |