Laughing at the Man with the Machete
I couldn’t see his face, but I could see his blade.
I couldn’t sleep.
The mattress was too hard; the room was too cold. The bed didn’t come with a blanket—just a well-used cotton sheet on its way to becoming sheer. The room’s curtain didn’t fully cover the window, allowing in the flickering orange light of an outside flood lamp. It cast ever-changing shadows throughout the room. One moment the hard lines were there, above the TV, along the desk, across the ceiling, the next they weren’t.
Days earlier, I booked the small Texas town motel, thinking more of price and less of comfort. But as that old saying goes, you get what you pay for. Apparently, I paid for uneasy anxiety.
The dogs had no problems sleeping. Coiled together for warmth, they didn’t wake when I slid from the ancient mattress, limp springs rippling to life like stadium fans doing the “wave”—a testament to how exhausted the two pups were after a full day of driving across the state.
I checked my phone. An obscene time blinked back at me, stuck in the realm of being both too early and too late.
Doing my best to dress quietly, I sat on the edge of the bed, tying my shoes. One of the dogs lazily sniffed at my elbow but had slumped back to sleep by the time I…
