trammelled ovenbird As soon as I reach the front desk of the hotel I feel nervous. There’s nothing blatantly wrong, but there’s a feeling, (you might know the one), a sense of the uncanny crouching below the surface of things, a whiff of the ominous. The air isn’t quite right, as if I can feel the vibration of screams that are below the threshold of hearing. I check in using an airline ticket that says B2500 across the top in black text. The flight attendant smiles at me. It’s meant to be reassuring but there are cockroaches crawling underneath her regard. It does not concern me that the hotel is also, somehow, an airport. That’s not what’s worrisome. It’s something else…something I push away because surely I’m just overreacting. I leave the lobby of the hotel. I find myself in a long hallway. A door is open at the end. Red light spills from the gap. And then I see. I see what’s inside. The damned. The condemned. The unsuspecting victims who checked into this hotel and are now enduring unspeakable torments. The guests are naked and stumbling through a room criss-crossed with filaments of razor wire. They are disoriented and unsteady on their feet. Their eyes are mouths open wide to scream, but there is no sound. They crash into threads, sharp as scalpels, and their flesh splits open, until their bodies are sliced into cubes of bleeding muscle like the scored top of a holiday ham. I smell iron and cloves. Terror pries open my eyes so I can’t look away. I wake, with a dry mouth and pounding heart, but the dream won’t leave me alone. As sleep takes me under again the dream comes with it. I’m back in the hotel. I’ve acquired a guide, a man dressed like Indiana Jones with a coiled whip tucked into his belt. We have to get to the ninth floor. We find an elevator. We fight off hordes of people crazed with panic to get in. We ascend faster than a rocket. On the ninth floor we are, mercifully, alone. We sit on the dirty carpet and see who can eat the most dried rice noodles. The world record is two thousand noodles. My guide eats two thousand and one. I count. The noodles look like zip ties. He crunches them all in his mouth and swallows. I eat powdered cheese from a box of macaroni, dipping a wet finger into orange dust. We’re soon beset by zombies, but the man pulverizes them with his whip. I scream that I have to save the children and throw myself under a moving car, where my body is crushed to a jammy pulp. I wave from under the front tire, a gesture that means “go on without me.” That’s motherhood in a nutshell, isn’t it? I am roadkill, flattened into a two dimensional approximation of myself, while the world moves on, running into a future that doesn’t know my name. 260409 what's it to you? who go blather from