The bed sagged like a cracked raft, smelling of rust, salt, and lost time. The other side was hollowed out, a dent where someone used to dream.
The air bent yellow at the edges. A radio somewhere cracked and whined — low country and western misery, a voice leaking out about someone who never came home.
The floor leaned west, always west, because that's where things go when they’re too tired to fight.
The clock on the wall had stopped sometime last night, but no one noticed, not even the dark.
The sea dragged the dead nets, and the chain inside the walls, hummed low against the bones of the room.
It ran through my empty wallet, through my cracked teeth, through the long thin cigarettes burning themselves out.
It rattled whenever I breathed too hard.
The motel bible sat open on the nightstand, a page torn loose, a note scrawled in blue ink: "don’t wait for me."
I tasted rust, saw the green of rotting rope, felt the floorboards creak with a tired red sadness.
White gulls circled low, no purpose left; their shadows vanish into the sea’s forgetting.
I thought about standing up, walking toward the window, singing along with the sad broken radio.
I didn’t move. The tide had already taken everything.
Shadow rattles through dreams of a non-trivial world— a lattice of wires and heat exchange, ragtime pulsing beneath the tireless rhythm of rails and ties.
Through this windowed trespass of industrial apprehension, we pass ductwork like iron lungs, humming with function, resigned to necessity.
We ride inoculated, immune by the promise of arrival, fleeing once again the rust-backed burden, the redbrick breath of imposition.
She came through the lobby in heels that sounded like secrets, dragging a suitcase that probably held regrets neatly folded next to a book of spells.
The clerk said she had that look— like she’d once been painted on the side of a bomber plane, or whispered about in backseats and divorce papers.
They gave her Room 237, because of course they did. Where else would a woman like that stay but down the hallway that never quite ends?
She ordered champagne at midnight, left no tip, and signed the bill “Love, Karma.”
Some say she rewrote dreams. Others, that she stole them. Mostly, she just waited— watching time melt down the window like candle wax.
Men dropped around her like poker chips at a rigged table, grinning through the gamble, and left with their names misspelled in the mirror.
When the flowers stopped and the world got bored of her perfume and promise, she slipped into the velvet-lined box beneath the lobby gift shop, a mannequin saint with sale tags on her sins and a crucifix worn like costume jewelry.
Now tourists lean in, take photos, whisper, "Wasn’t she someone?"
And somewhere— behind the front desk, or in the static of the lobby jazz— the universe clears its throat, adjusts its tie, and laughs, quietly, into its infinite hand.
1. The moon said: “Your shadow has been impersonating you.”
The crow cocked his head, pecked once at his feet, and stared behind himself like betrayal might be hiding just past the tail feathers.
2. The moon said: “I watched you steal fire from a god then choke on the smoke.”
The crow flared his wings, feathers bristling like broken knives. He remembered that sky— the burning alphabet, the gods cursing in reverse, the ash that clung to his beak for a thousand silent winters.
3. The moon said: “Worms dream louder than birds.”
The crow blinked hard, his eyes fogged over like windshields in winter, and he let out a caw that sounded more like a question than a cry.
4. The moon said: “The sky is a lid. You’re inside the jar.”
The crow twitched. One wing spasmed, his claws tightened on the crescent— clutching not for balance, but for the memory of escape.
5. The moon said: “You were never born. You’ve just been very committed to the act.”
The crow went still. His pupils dilated into voids. He opened his beak, but nothing came out. Even silence abandoned him.
6. The moon said: “You’ve been flying in circles because you’re the message, not the messenger.”
The crow froze. No blink. No twitch. As if time had taken a breath.
Inside his bones a black wind stirred— the old hunger, the laughing void that once tore language from the sky and fed him its feathers.
He did not speak. He did not move. He simply fell inward— like a stone into still water— and from somewhere deeper than flight, he heard it:
Boho Dreams of Space and Time 