This Endless Road by Michael Overa

Author:Michael Overa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction, short stories, 2018, unsolicited press, michael overa, this endless road
Publisher: Unsolicited Press

The Ghost of Herself

She’s grown accustomed to the transience of buses and hitched rides; cut-rate motels that stink of strangers that loitered too long in their own desperation. She’s become a connoisseur of motel rooms: the way the water pressure is better in one, or the way another has a softer bed. At first the rooms blurred together, and then slowly they separated out into distinct places.

And so, she appreciates that a certain room is located on the top floor where the distant freeway noise is absorbed by a too-empty parking lot. She pushes open the door and instinctively reaches down to crank the AC. The mattress sags perceptibly towards the center, and the springs give beneath her as she sits on the edge of the bed. She slips off her shoes and folds her legs beneath her as she lights a cigarette and reaches across to the nightstand where a glass ashtray sits empty save for a book of matches. As smoke catches on the updraft of air conditioning, she upends the paper Food Emporium bag on the bed. Cigarettes, hair dye, and scissors cluster on the faded bedspread and she sets to work on the cardboard and plastic packaging of the scissors. She tests the slow zip of the blades before inspecting the packet of dye with its plastic mixing tray and flimsy gloves. How much time and energy did she invest in beauty school – how much money – only to sit in a thirty-dollar motel room with ten-dollar dye and five-dollar scissors?

Her roots have grown a quarter of an inch or more since leaving San Antonio, a physical calendar of juxtaposed salon bleached hair with nearly black roots. Her hair has become brittle from the endless desert air and hotel shampoo. Standing in front of the mirror she begins to cut haphazardly, pulling fistfuls of hair and snipping only a few inches from the roots. The physical change will now match the emotional change simmering inside her. This is a reincarnation of selves, she tells herself as clumps of hair gather in puddles at her feet like sloughed off skin.

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