Grief led me to the hotel on a leash. 

I did not say death. I did not say a lack of. Those meant descriptions of bony hands shaking as they turned to husks with life bled out of them, still clinging to another very living hand, a collar around a very living throat. Lack-of only emphasized what was lacking, which was unnecessary and already done. Grief suited my situation and purposes without elaboration. To the point and not a toe beyond it. 

Not so long ago, two weeks or maybe a month I would elaborate. I would draw out the exact specifications, like an architect and stonemason at a mausoleum. People told me at the funeral and obligatory lunches that the act of telling, of having someone to listen made it all so much more bearable. So I did. I told people whenever possible. Wrote letters to friends and family to acquaint them with the exacting nature of my feelings. For the months after her death, I preoccupied myself with making sure everyone who was vaguely interested knew, knew my feelings, knew the situation. 

It wasn’t typical. And it wasn’t comfortable, in the end. The consolatory lunches—never called that, but I knew full well what they were—turned to a teary explanation of that Day, that Night, even when I knew I should stop the explanation no one asked for, and the tears were embarrassing for a grown woman, especially over an event that happened months before. Reactions proved it. Friends stopped responding as much to my letters and comments, or responded with growing silence and not-quite-right-things. What was the point of all that talk if no one paid proper attention?

My mind turned this over as I thanked the bellhops for the luggage and again for the lobby door. I was overtired and overeager to get out of the California heat, mind overworked.

I stopped saying how I loved this certain place, or that activity was great fun before that Night. When I bottled up, already spent emotion wouldn’t bubble across paper and tabletops like spilled wine. No more tears to mark tablecloths.

Of course, I was only being dramatic. Surely. Must have been. I don’t act like the stage version of a woman. Yes, it was ridiculous. I was ridiculous. 

Maybe it was a coping mechanism.

Whatever it might be, I only smiled and accepted my room key. 

Those around me kept saying the death was sudden, and it was. Which was improper, wasn’t it? Death was supposed to be a slow decay into bed and grave; murder was a bludgeon to the head or bullet to the brain, something swift. Sudden murder was feasible by nature; sudden death was improper. Sudden should never happen.

Only it had.

Selene was a  bit unwell for a couple of days, but she was unwell often enough, anyway, so no one raised any alarms. It was at the point where she often joked she would haunt me, and then I asked her to, a formal request for her afterlife self to file. Less than an hour before, we laughed at the much-made and much-rehearsed jokes, just as normal.

(Then she keeled over onto the table just after the caviar was whisked away.) 

I heard all the reasons said when young people die sudden as cyanide. Only it wasn’t. 

I thought. I remembered. I think I remembered.

That’s what I told the police.

The room was a nice one and not unfamiliar. That typical modern art deco style, just like the rest of the hotel, typical of the places Selene liked to stay. Clean, well-appointed, expensive. Large windows took up most of one wall so sunlight fell across the polished mahogany coffee table and couch, and then behind it the bed. The room, the bed, all of it seemed so impossibly oversized. The feeling solidified when the bellhop rolled my luggage in and asked is there anything else you need, miss?

There was nothing and he left without further comment. 

I was alone. In a room surely designed for more than one person. The type of place labelled as a suite. The bed was set slightly away and up, able to be closed off with sliding doors, and the couch and table on a level slightly below. A room made for more than one person, maybe even a couple on honeymoon wrapped in green upholstery and carved wood and shining metal accents.

I could slice my hand open on all those modern touches.

A room meant for people who came after a long time of plans and anticipation. They came more than willing. More likely than not led to the hotel by veils and tuxedo ties, bound together by wedding bands and jewels and law. Recognized. Alone, the so-called honeymoon suite was no longer a moot point and a sly joke between the two of us. The irony turned unintentionally cruel and pointed, as if knowingly plotted against me. To point out that lack and the demands of grief. Because it was a lack. In the conventional sense I was lacking.

We were never married. I never married. I never would. I would forever lack recognition, of the legal variety and any other kind. I didn’t mind at that point. Over time, even before, I had gotten used to the truth of not-quite-respect. 

It didn’t matter now. 

I went through my typical routine. I walked through the room, checked for any abnormalities and imperfections, but there were none. Both faucets worked fine. Windows opened and closed, curtains completely covered the view of the city below when drawn. The bed sheets clean and soft. I made quick work of unpacking my bags, at least a bit. Not as much as Selene would’ve liked me to. It’s not as much work as it was with half the luggage, and I don’t need to, but the routine is a comfort. It doesn’t take much time after all my practice. I was efficient. 

When Selene joked with her friends, our all-too-knowing friends, her voice would lilt as she said that’s why she had me travel with her. I was organized, clean, neat, et cetera. 

How utilitarian. Really. 

I could see her, limned by the midday rays slanting through the window, stereotypical Californian palm trees visible behind, her hair turned into a halo. She turned and said, you don’t need to do all that now, held up a cigarette she didn’t light. Or she did light it, but it rarely touched her lips.

I didn’t listen, and continued as before. All my new dresses and petticoats and new and over-expensive pairs of green leather and genuine snakeskin shoes just as they would have been, if Selene were to look for them or they were her own. 

The dinner was normal. Pedestrian would be the word from another tongue, or else it would be called indifferent. Yes, indifferent was used to describe a hole-in-the-wall Parisian cafe, a red-tiled restaurant in Milan, an otherwise first-rate establishment in Shanghai, a hotel restaurant in Monte Carlo. Most were judgements Selene gave in haste and when over tired, or just after the receipt of bad news, not judgements the establishments deserved. 

I believed this hotel meal did deserve the judgement. It was a jarring break from memory from the time last summer at this same table, all the food flavourful and luxurious. The memory of taste coated my tongue, with nothing underneath.

The woodcut baguette and crackers with sawdust caviar and olive tapenade spooned on top like salted french butter. Pasta and the stroganoff sauce from the finest soot. Dessert was some flaky pastry with powdered sugar dust and ash sprinkled on top. They must have a woodpile and furnace out back. Inconsistent with my not-so-long-ago memory.  

The couple at the table next to me were on their honeymoon I thought. They laughed and smiled, held each other’s hand and leaned close over the table as if they were the only two in the world. No doubt within a year or two she would be prescribed tranquilizers and he would have an affair with his secretary. They fit the profile, just like so many couples I knew. Selene and I would snicker at them behind our hands, because they were so comically bad at pretense. Their masks were flimsy and unpracticed. It wouldn’t take too long for my neighbors’ blossoming love to devolve and decay. Their eyes too bright, their gestures too enthusiastic. 

Overcompensating. I almost heard the word whispered from across the table, with a chuckle just underneath.

 She would be sitting there, of course, and talk in a practiced murmur over the clink of silverware on porcelain. All of it was so proper, and acting like all that proprietary was a joke for me and my benefit alone. She made sure one moment, and turned carelessly brash to the point of cruelty the next. 

The honeymooners next to me didn’t have any worries of detection or what might happen if someone saw them look at each other for a moment too long. They were allowed to slip up. Encouraged, even. Fools in love or something of the sort. And they looked oh so foolish.

With a crystal vase of flowers for company, I hoped their meals were arsenic. I willed them to force down every bite, willed the almond tint of cyanide to push them to delirium. And even if it didn’t get both, I had no doubt they would be invited and welcomed at the others’ funeral. Wasn’t that obligation a strange sort of punishment? They were shackled together with wedding bands, after all. 

It made unspilled vitriol burn like gasoline in my throat. It would swallow me if I wasn’t careful. Drag me down with familiar, feminine, frail hands into the grave. Maybe I would be grateful. 

Except it wasn’t working. I was not dragged anywhere or to anyone, only to this hotel on the coast and half-empty rooms and hovering memory, with the sneering vase of lilies and carnations as company. All the good that it did me, with the wine and the still choking feeling in my throat. Which—what a waste that would be to choke. I was not the problem.

I pictured the man at that table getting that meal stuck in his throat, coughing and fighting against it until his face turned blue and he fell over onto the table and there was nothing to be done for him, or that clueless and until-moments-before happy girl across from him. 

Those celebrated two would be reduced to nothing. What would she possibly do or be without him, herself carved out of herself. What a lovely husk that girl would make. 

And then a waiter would come up to whisk the caviar away, just in time to see the result and quick enough to not understand. The new-and-then-not-at-all wife would sit there silent, in shock, and not be able to tell the tuxedoed man what happened, the waiter who wouldn’t know any better. Customers got drunk all the time, and this was the kind of place with discretion included in the price tag. She will sit, paralyzed by shock until she brings herself to reach out and feel a fumbling or still pulse at his throat, and while her mouth works to form words that won’t come, maybe someone will finally notice her distress, as if there isn’t a person face down on the table. 

No one could notice for hours. Who knows? His body’s cooling drowned out by silverware and conversation.  

It was not a kind image. It was a mirror of a horrid thing, and yet. . . It was a form of comfort. 

He didn’t have to choke, not on food but a napkin around the throat would do the trick, too. Poison would have the same effect. At the funeral, because she would be implicitly and inevitably invited, people would say a stroke or the heart, because freak accidents happen. 

If I could bring myself to get up, even walk over to that table, I’d do it myself. 

Is everything to your satisfaction, miss? 

The waiter was there again, a wine bottle in hand in expectation of refills. Selene would say Divinely pedestrian with such a glowing smile, that they would forget anything else and simply think she thought it was divine. I did not have such power, so I only nodded and smiled even though I didn’t care for the taste of wood and dust. 

When I picked up the match and struck it, my mind turned over the words: They lied. 

Well, they did. 

Talking did not make me feel better. It never did. After I was only a hollow thing, decaying from the inside and invisible. Whatever apparently needed to be said was said, and I felt all the more like an open wound because of it. They put on a sympathetic ghost smile that plugged their ears. And that was that.

It was destruction from complacency, and the belief that it would be fine without a hand so much as lifted in an offer of help.

The curtains caught first, the green velvet and gold tassels turned to curls and crumbles of chars and ash. The color of arsenic-infused Victorian wallpaper turned to smoke and fire. 

I lit another match as I watched, because charred curtains can only do so much. It burned my fingertips. That match was thrown onto the bed like an afterthought as I walked passed. A part of my customary, swift room inventory while smoke spooled around. The flame was slow to catch on the silk bedclothes. 

My mind flashed to one of Selene’s cigarettes that scalded her fingers rapt in the middle of a conversation, too caught up in anger or happiness, during quiet nights and tired obligation dinners. Or the small flame tickled my skin when I lit a match for her if she waited too long to light and to notice, but she would notice. She never let me burn, no. 

I watched from the door, the still-shiny alligator skin suitcases, inlaid with what would forever be my initials in gold, on either side like obedient pets. I stashed the match box in my front pocket, and did not think twice when I scooped up my luggage. Did not look back again. Everything was gathered  before the curtains and bedsheets caught slow fire, and slowly the room that Selene took such careful time to reserve glowed and turned to embers. She had pored over notes at the desk at home, kept her growing frustration chained during phone calls. She was so patient when she planned. 

Her death, whatever I say it was or wasn’t — sickness, a stroke, murder, poison — was not patient. Only never mind that now. Nevermind. 

The room with her name on the reservation, still on the books, would be reduced to charred splinters and heat twisted metal soon enough. And no more of this gleaming hotel for a while. Vacationers would have to go elsewhere for their view of the Pacific. South closer to San Diego. North to Monterey and San Francisco. It wouldn’t take much searching.

  No one stopped me at the doors when I walked out. Tall, shining glass windows to show twilight descending over the ocean, and in memory a sunset I had forgotten to take in that Night she died. Numb and shaking and unable to believe a place like this could use the basement to accommodate unexpected, unalive guests while a member of staff was kind enough to guide me to the elevator. I remember they said just in case. 

I pulled a crumpled, mostly empty box of Selene’s oft burned but rarely smoked cigarettes. She claimed it was for effect, and it was, if I ignored the way her hands would shake toward the end. Even though I noticed her habit, I didn’t say a thing and after that night and that dinner I tried to forget it. Soon as the cigarette was lit and stashed between my fingers, I dropped the still glowing match to the impossible to place but no doubt imported carpet. 

No one questioned me as I hastened to my waiting car. Before the ember caught on to the carpet. Before the alarms properly demanded attention from the upper floors. Only a faint alarm, one that could be ignored until flames engulfed, until the smoke choked through lungs and airways.

How easy such things could be ignored, until one was drowning in it. Until, until, until. 

I threw my suitcases in the empty back seat, same as the half empty spot on the bench seat next to me. That’s why I drove. That’s why I started the ignition. That’s why fallen cigarette ash scuffed the steering wheel. I didn’t used to drive, but for necessity’s sake I had to.

Now it was only a short distance down the coastal road, close enough to still see the hotel. I pulled off to the side of the road. There was a faint sound of fire engines, and over that waves crashing on the sand. I focused on that, and the growing red-orange flames from the hotel windows against a darkening sky. 

The cigarette still in hand, a forgotten thing, burned down to my fingers. 

Edited by Ella Wu

Artist Statement: While a concept like this has been floating around my mind for some time, I started to write this over break, and picked it up again at the start of the quarter. I wanted to experiment with more first person writing. Part of this is to give a level of ambiguity, which I felt better suited the piece than when I originally started writing in third person. I also wanted to deal with grief, loss and isolation, and decided to turn the idealism and haunting effect of memory into the anonymous narrator’s mental decay/ downward spiral. The title comes from words used to discuss disease, and fit the general feel and themes of the piece.