Passage from the Life of a Hotel Clerk — by Alex Ranieri

(The lobby empties after a busy afternoon. The clerk’s coworker goes on break, and our protagonist is left alone.)

Quiet descended after his departure—and here, at last, in the mellow orange light of the lobby, so tightly wrapped in the surrounding darkness, escape was mine! No longer did the Felix Hotel imprison me—no longer did Time itself hold sway. The neon sign for the massage parlor across the street, the pantomime pageant of men trickling in and out of the barber’s, the pseudo-smoke pluming from teenagers’ lips behind the window of the vape shop—all these might vanish, or might shape shift into fantasies much different from themselves. I possessed the power of transformation—and the young woman running her hands through a customer’s fresh-cut hair might, at my command, shed her mundane skin, and emerge an odalisque pleasing her Sultan, or a Calypso entwining wary Odysseus. The parlor sign might twist its neon around new words—might invite the careless to an otherworldly feast—and the streets themselves, under morose and rain-slick facades, might echo back to me the footsteps of another century.

And where was I? Who watched this fantastical procession, twisting continuous from one reality to the next? She was forgotten, if she ever was—and this I counted the greatest escape of all. What could be more miserable than to find in oneself another prison?