by Ray Cluley
There were whispers in there, whispers in the darkness. He reached around the frame for the light switch.
The first thing he saw when the light came on was the usual motel scenery. A large bed, nearly-white sheets tight across it with a tatty blanket on top, and a bedside table with one drawer. The drawer would have contained a bible in the old days but now probably held dried balls of gum and cigarette burns. A TV angled down from the wall so it could be seen from the twin room as well, though the door to that was closed. Somewhere there’d be a tiny bathroom that didn’t have a bath.
The second thing he saw was movement as a number of cockroaches scurried for cover. Their shiny bodies glistened in the light they tried to run from. One sped for the shadows under the bed while another moved as if lost. One made straight for the open door.
John brought his foot down hard but missed. The insect dropped down between two boards of the porch.
“Beautiful room, dear,” said Ann. But she went in, slinging her bag onto the bed. Fearless city girl that once was.
John went in ahead of Matt, knocking him as he passed. He said sorry as if it was an accident and Matt had to fight the urge to kick the back of his feet into a tangle that would send him sprawling to all fours.
John put the TV on and sat on the bed, looking up at a commercial.
Ann opened and closed the drawer.
“Picture’s shit,” John told them. He glanced at Matt and added, “Shot,” as an alternative.
Matt dumped the bags and went to find the bathroom. He expected to find it between the two bedrooms.
He found it between the two bedrooms.
There was nothing there to scare away with the light. Just a sink and a toilet and a mirror. The mirror was spotted with neglect that would never wipe away. It distorted Matt’s reflection, darkened his face with blotches. Someone had smeared a fingernail of snot on it.
“Nice.”
He unzipped, lifted the toilet lid, and pissed, tearing a sheet of tissue to wipe the mirror with. It wasn’t until he was shaking dry that he saw the cockroach turning in the bowl. Its body span in a current Matt had just made and its legs kicked at the air. It would never get out.
I know exactly how you feel.
He flushed it away, wondering how it had gotten in there in the first place.
“Matt,” Ann called, “can you fix the TV?”
He glanced again at the mirror on his way out, wondering what had happened to the man he saw there.
S
Back when Matt smoked and drank, when he was single, when he was playing and the band was doing pretty good and could maybe one day do better, he got into a fight with a guy because the man was yelling at a woman. He did it because it was often a sure way to get laid and the woman looked good for that. Red hair, straight and long, good breasts and striking eyes. She wore a top that pushed her tits up and her eyes she showed off with subtle makeup.
“The picture won’t stay like it’s supposed to,” she said as he emerged from the bathroom. She tossed the remote onto the bed and continued pulling things from her bag. Instead of makeup, these days her eyes were lined with tiny wrinkles. She rarely looked at Matt now as she had back then. The way she looked at him now was like he was exactly the way she supposed. Her eyes still lit up when she smiled but that was less frequent, and usually because of some TV show. The first time she came her eyes had been wide and her mouth was a pretty O, as if the orgasm had startled her. He hadn’t seen that for years.
Matt reached up and turned the TV off by the main switch. “Fixed,” he said.
John muttered something Matt ignored and Ann ignored the both of them.
“I’ll get some dinner,” Matt said.
John threw himself onto his own bed and stretched out. “Pizza.”
“He’s not driving tonight,” Ann told her son. She didn’t use the most supportive tone.
Matt left, closing the door on both of them and resting his hands on the porch rails. He looked at the sky and saw nothing he hadn’t seen a hundred times before. The words of the motel sign were invisible now, hidden in the glare of a surrounding neon rectangle. The yellow tubes looked like they’d been white once and then pissed on.
Across the lot, on the shorter length of an L-shaped porch, the woman continued to smoke and drink. Occasionally she’d look at the end of what she smoked but mostly she looked at the ground.
Matt took a deep breath. He hadn’t had a cigarette in six years (Ann had urged him to quit) and so he hoped for some second-hand smoke. What he smelt instead, carried to him on the dusty air, was the welcome tang of marijuana. He filled his lungs with it, slight as it was. He watched as the woman released another mouthful of smoke, wishing he was near enough to breath it in.
He went to the vending machines instead.
A couple of cockroaches, alarmed by his approach, hurried out from beneath the machine and raced past his foot, slipping under the door of room 12. Others congregated around a nearby garbage sack, bumping into each other and adjusting their course.
The vending machine offered the usual candy and chips as well as some microwave snacks, though he hadn’t seen a microwave in the room. He rummaged in his pocket for money and found only a couple of folded bills. The readout told him NO CHANGE.
He’d see if the woman could help him.
She heard him coming and puffed a final time on her joint. She was stubbing it out and chasing the last toke with beer when he offered his money and said he needed change.
“Of course,” she said. “Change.” But she made no move to give him any. He leant closer with the cash and she took it with a sigh. She stood up and stretched, pushing out her chest in a way that was all the more alluring for being unintentional, her hands at the small of her back until it clicked. He wondered how long she’d been sitting out here. Before he could ask, or make any kind of conversation, she was stepping into the office behind her.
“For the machine?” she asked, calling it slowly. Lazily. The same way she drank her beer.
“Yeah.”
She returned with a handful. “It’s kinda picky with what it likes,” she said, explaining all the coins.
“Great. Thanks.”
She puffed her hair out of her face, brushed it aside when that didn’t work. “Anything else?”
“Yes, actually. Do you have a microwave back there? Only I saw—”
“Yeah, we got one,” she said, sitting again. “Just bring whatever you get and I’ll nuke it.” The gulp she took of her beer was an obvious goodbye.
Matt went back to the machine. He fed it coins until it served him his choices and took them back to the woman.
“Can I help you?” she asked. It wasn’t like she’d forgotten seeing him already. And it was disconcertingly earnest.
“Sure,” he said. “You can nuke these.” He tried a smile.
“That’s it?”
He wondered if she was a hooker after all.
“Er . . .”
She took the food from him and carried it back in, sidestepping over a cockroach that sped across the floor. It turned a circle and went back the other way.
“Where you heading?” she asked, tossing the packets into the microwave. For a ridiculous moment he thought she was talking to the roach.
“Nowhere.”
She looked at him, started the microwave. “You got two minutes,” she said over its hum.
Matt laughed politely. “Home,” he said. “Picked the boy up from his dad’s, saw the in-laws. They want to give me a job.”
“Not good?”
“No.”
“What do you do?”
He said it for the first time in years. “I’m a musician.” Words that used to impress every girl he ever said them to. Some pretended otherwise, but it alw
ays worked.
“Not any more,” she said.
“What?”
“Not if ma and pa get their way.”
“Oh. Yeah. Exactly.”
“They just want what’s best,” she said. It was what Ann had told him, several times, until the drive lulled her to sleep. He’d probably end up taking the damn job.
They were quiet until the microwave dinged.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I want them to leave me the fuck alone.”
Matt’s surprise registered only when he saw hers. She offered food that looked as plastic as its wrapping. “I meant which of these is yours?”
He took it all without specifying, muttered, “Thanks,” and hurried back to his room.
S
He expected Ann to give him shit about how long he’d been. Wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d spied on him from behind the blinds. He braced himself for it. He opened the door and went in, dropped the lukewarm food on the bed, shut the door, said, “Dinner,” and then saw John.
The boy was standing in the middle of the room and at first Matt thought he was attempting some kind of prank. He wore a black cloak draped over his shoulders and had wound dark tape around his chest and waist. He flailed his arms around in cardboard tubes that he’d stretched black socks over. This was how Matt rationalized it. John’s curved back was a shiny black that glistened in the room’s light. Matt could see Ann’s reflection in it, saw how she cowered in the corner of the room.
“Ann? What’s going on?”
Ann shook her head and made wordless noise. She was rocking from side to side, looking at the thing in the middle of the room.
“John?”
He had wires sticking up from some sort of black hat. He was screeching, rubbing his extended arms up and down his legs as he crouched and then knelt. He leant forward on his elbows and brought his feet up behind where they seemed to disappear into the cape that draped him. The head wires flicked back and forth like fishing rods casting line, or like antennae. Yeah, antennae, that was it. The boy’s knees opened and sprouted bristled limbs. His calves separated, spitting split shins into new feet. And still he was screeching.
Ann screeched with him. Her rocking had become easier thanks to something like a large curved shield she had on her back. Her clothes were disappearing as if melting into her skin, only to be replaced by an oil spreading from her pores. Matt watched as her breasts distended and spread into a single band of blackened flesh. He heard things cracking in her chest. Her stomach swelled then flattened and split into sections and her newly segmented body fell forward, face down to the floor. The glossy shield she wore on her back separated for a moment and shook thin wings before settling back into place. Her hair fell away as two protrusions sprouted from her head, dancing back and forth erratically as they grew. Claws burst from her palms as she reached for John. For Matt.
Matt retreated until he felt the door handle press against his back.
John was now a huddled shape the size of a suitcase. He bumped his way around the room, striking furniture and hissing. Ann was turning tight circles on the spot.
Matt opened the door behind him and rolled around it out of the room, slamming it shut. When a cockroach fled from beneath he brought his boot down quick and hard without thinking. There was a satisfying crunch. He slid his foot back, wiping the mess into a streak. The creatures in the room were hissing and fluttering and banging into things.
Matt stepped back from the door, waiting for it to bump with an impact. The porch rail stopped him stumbling into the parking lot. He leant against it and waited.
Eventually the sounds inside subsided.
He wiped his mouth, his stubbled chin, and glanced around to see who’d been alerted by the noise.
Across from him, in a chair pushed back against the doorframe, the woman sat drinking beer. She lowered the bottle and wiped her mouth as he had done. He stared at her for a long moment before she beckoned him over.
He went with a quick walk that wasn’t quite running, glancing back only once.
“Everything alright?” she said as he turned the corner into her section of the porch.
“My wife . . .”
He didn’t know how to finish.
“John. He . . .”
She nodded, got up, and went inside. By the time Matt was at her chair she had returned with another for him. She put it down beside hers and sat. “Yeah,” she said. “That happens sometimes.”
She gestured for him to sit. He did. When she picked up her beer she hooked another bottle with it and passed it over.
Matt looked briefly at the bottle and took his first mouthful of real beer in five years. Ann had made him quit, or rather she bought near-beer which was the same thing. He gulped until his mouth was awash with it. It was delicious.
“How did you find this place?” said the woman.
“I just turned off the freeway. I was tired. What’s happening?”
“It doesn’t matter.” She raised a leg and pushed against the rail to tip her chair back. She kept her foot on the rail and took another swallow of beer, leaning back in a comfortable balance. “Even if I could tell you.”
“They’re fucking cockroaches,” Matt said. He’d finally pushed the words from his mouth.
“I don’t think they’re at the fucking stage yet,” the woman said. “Gotta get used to it first.”
Matt shook his head. He was calmer than he should’ve been, but he wasn’t ready for jokes. “They are cockroaches?”
“Mm. Tough little critters. But then so are we, right?” She drained the last of her beer and set the bottle down with the row of other empties. From her angled position on the chair she couldn’t quite set it down properly and it fell, spinning. Matt watched as it slowed to a stop, the neck pointing his way, and thought of games he’d played as a teenager.
“So the kid’s not yours?” she said.
“No. God, no. He’s a—”
“Cockroach.” She sniggered the abrupt laugh of someone drunk. She had been looking out into the dark but faced him to say, “Sorry.”
He shrugged. “I was going to say asshole.”
“Like his father?”
She asked the questions without seeming to care for answers. Like they were rehearsed, or lines she knew well from a familiar movie. Matt answered her anyway with another shrug, adding, “You know, she didn’t even tell me she had a kid until we’d been together a year? Can you believe that?”
The woman handed him another beer and he slapped the top off against the railing. He brought it up to his mouth so quick for the foam he hit his teeth. The woman winced for him as he gulped it down. She looked back into the darkness.
“You wanna be a rock star, huh?” she said. She smiled when she said it, looked his way so he could see it before it went. “The bright lights of fame and fortune.”
“Sounds stupid now,” he admitted.
They watched the moths beating themselves against the motel sign. Closer, Matt could see the words within the neon. He noticed the lack of apostrophe, Travellers Stay, and wondered if it was true for everyone.
“What are you doing here?” he asked her.
“Nice girl like me in a place like this?” She spat an arcing stream of beer into the parking lot. “Hiding. Deciding what I want to be. I’m allowed to do that, you know.”
He held his hands up in surrender, though her tone hadn’t been entirely aggressive.
The woman set her chair down and rummaged in the front pocket of her jeans for a crumpled packet of cigarettes. Matt hoped she’d offer him one and she did. When he looked inside he saw a row of ready-made joints.
“You’re a musician, right?” she said, seeing his hesitation as reluctance.
He took one and ga
ve the packet back. “It’s been a long time.”
She returned the pack to her jeans without taking another. “If it’s your first in a while, we’ll share.” She pointed to where the lighter lay next to scattered cigarette butts. A couple were joints smoked down to fingertip length. Roaches, they were called, Matt remembered. This was a roach motel. He snorted a laugh.
“You gotta smoke it first,” the woman said.
He glanced over at room 8 and wiped his lips dry. He sparked a flame from the lighter. The paper pinched between his fingers crackled and glowed as he sucked the flame down. He shook the lighter out, a habit he’d had long ago, and exhaled smoke in one, two, three little puffs.
“Good man,” the woman said.
“Used to be.” He felt light-headed. It had been a long time. He passed the joint over.
“Thanks.”
“My name’s Matt.”
“Amber.”
A cockroach ran a straight line across the edge of the porch then turned and made for them on the chairs. Amber toed it aside gently and it hurried back the way it had come.
S
Matt seems to dream the sex and when he wakes he pulls her over and onto him so he can watch this girl with long un-red hair fuck him again, and she does, and this time slowly, but then he’s kneeling at the bedside pulling her jeans down and her panties and he realizes maybe he’s still drunk or still dreaming or remembering or something because this happened already. He kneels at the bedside and she opens her legs to him and he stares at her sex, but this time before he can stand, plunge, enter her, before he can feel that welcoming wet warmth of a new woman, a torrent of cockroaches spills from inside, a swarm that flows from between her legs to flood the room, dropping from the bed to the floor in inky waves, scurrying over his thighs and groin and tangling themselves in his pubic hair. When he tries to scream, something scampers up across his neck and chin and into his mouth, bristled legs tickling his lips and tongue, wings fluttering against his teeth, and when the squat weight of it slips down his throat he wakes up gagging.