Sunset Motor Lodge

Like the vacancy light shorted out with 40 rooms sitting empty in his chest.
But he didn’t notice.
The cherry gloss Mustangs stopped tapping their brakes to see if his asphalt was fresh enough to burn.
The black F-150s just roared by puking diesel smoke and Metallica onto the night’s tongue.
Every few weeks an American station wagon would take the lonely right.
Pause beneath the carport.
Squint through the sun-cracked WE ACCEPT sticker, one MasterCard hoop and all of a Diner’s Club International® logo.
Still there.
Meeting the eyes behind the desk, they’d jerk like a rollercoaster.
Forward past the parched kidney bean pool.
The skeleton of a diving board draped in yellow caution tape.
Marlboro scars on the wrists of a lounge chair.
Rubber belts, burnt by the sun, to the color of drapes. Blue and white, once.
“Like Hollywood. Like an oasis.” Old words salted among 40 seasons of dead fall.
Onward, through the swarm of locust that made a home in the sound of the ice machine.
Lurching from one A/C unit to the next. All whispering, “nope,” in chorus.
Welcomed only by two chunks of concrete parking block, torn at the gut by ice and wind, one strand of rusting rebar.
Holding it all together.
He hated how he always looked. How he hated how hope held high.
No one ever parked. Just creeping U-turns in 1 to 5 points.
To get free.
Back beneath the carport, eyes buried.
Fingers fiddling with nothing.
Back to the lonely right. 15–55 seconds frozen at the curb.
Blinkers thumping the rack of faded brochures like a strobe light in a memory.
A gap, a jerk, no apology.
Miles down the highway, on a shoulder, nodding off, in a reclined passenger seat, at a farm exit, they’d think,
“I could’ve been happy there.”