Sophie Klahr

Motel Interlude

Once upon a time, you wanted Marie to show you the buried horse, her green eyes flashing over packed earth as night’s teeth pierced agave, saguaro, a revenging serpent… Almost there, she might have said, almost there. Slipped leather in the dark new as a colt, and your head lowering between Marie’s chest and the steering wheel in cahoots with the moon. Always this same fantasy, taking place in a moment when you passed the moment up, or was it the moment passing you, like two cars on a two-lane road both suddenly risen to one another in hilly farmland where you’d never think of farmland being—this particular fantasy just revisionist history. The rolled down windows of the truck taking in the desert’s dark. Marie’s head sinking back against the headrest. You think of novelty sweets—luminous pale pink rock candy on a long wooden stick. Nothing easy about it; the nearing miss, like a clearing. The motel was an interlude, an ark. I’ve mentioned an ark already haven’t I? As a child, I thought often of the biblical ark. The crow, the dove, the rain. The fecal dust in the ship’s hold, animals moaning in their sleep. I thought of the people in the other motel rooms, on their ways to sell something, to find their own elsewhere. Marie, now, not even a friend. I thought I tasted medicine in the stillness, in my alone-ness. I thought there was a moral to the story. 

Sophie Klahr is the author of Two Open Doors in a Field (University of Nebraska Press), Meet Me Here at Dawn (YesYes Books), and co-author of There Is Only One Ghost in the World (Fiction Collective Two), which won the 2022 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest. Her writing appears in The New Yorker and elsewhere. She offers online classes, poetry editing (both small batches & manuscripts), Office Hours, submission management services and more via sophieklahr.org. She lives in Los Angeles.