Northern_Lights_2017

14 Motel Inn Amanda Conway “I shaved my legs for this?” Her bleached blonde hair had fallen awry from the fancy updo she got at the downtown salon, four hours earlier, four hundred dollars later. Dried, dead, useless. She looks at him, baffled, offended. “I can’t do this”, he says. “Well, you’re balding!” “Well, you’re painfully stupid.” Strike four, he hopes, so she can leave, and he can go on with his painful existence, lamenting his lack of faith in humanity. But she stayed. Plopped down on the hotel bed, he could smell the scent of chemicals coated on her body. Carefully concocted for a target audience, the undying struggle to achieve some sense of femininity, she was the perfect example. She stood, arms crossed, in front of the television. He reached for the remote and turned it on. Her snide tone interrupted the updates of the day’s murders. “What is wrong with you?” “Lots of things.” He focused intently on her sheer green dress, where the moving pictures hid, as if he was interested, as if he enjoyed watching television, all for the sake of ignoring her out of the room, out of his life. “You don’t like me?” “I wish I did, but that would require me to go back in time and never attempt to have a conversation with you… about anything.” He didn’t want to be mean. He didn’t want anything, really, except to enjoy his own company alongside a fresh bottle of gin. Women like her weren’t special. Her arms dropped to her sides. He felt bad for her, but only a little. And her orange-brown skin looked even more tanned, a leathery hide in harsh fluorescent motel light. Her hipbones protruded beneath the drapery of her soft dress. Is this what evolution has provided humanity to indulge in? To enjoy? “What is beauty? What is my perception of beauty? What is wrong with my perception? Who’s to say anyone’s perception is right or wrong? What is wrong with me?” In the midst of his thoughts, he failed to notice her dramatic departure along with the rest of his cocaine.