Sean Ennis- Fiction

Its Powerful Parking Lot

I did not sleep like a winner. Yes, I had watched Vivian turn one hundred dollars into almost three hundred thousand dollars at the craps table. And yes, we had made love in the suite at the Sapphire Blue Hotel and Casino, and she kept her Old Rats motorcycle gang jacket on. And yes, yes, I even woke bosom-wise with Vivian holding me like a languid, miracle baby. Still, I was up in the middle of the night. I egressed.

From the suite’s balcony, I was expecting, for some reason, a bright and pulsing skyline, honking horns, squeals, the competing rhythms of life. Instead, the vast casino parking lot, lit like an operating room.  And trashed in this white-blue light, wandering among the parked cars and picking up abandoned gaming cards, was an Old Rat.  He spotted me up on the balcony and said, “Hey, you sad little bug! You’re doing great! Sleep well!” 

There are places in Bramble, USA where you can best tune into the wavelength of human sadness and sorrow. It’s oppressive. It’s a nuisance. The women’s dormitory at Bramble County Community College was also one of these nodes, as well as one particular seat at the TGI Friday’s bar in the Bramble Mall.

So that Old Rat must have really been going through it (the empathy), roving through the powerful parking lot like that. But his reaction to being attuned to so much grief and loss and regret and misery was to be kinder. He had wished me well. You might expect something different from a motorcycle gang member, but The Old Rats were a complicated bunch. Even Vivian was up, behind me now, wearing a Sapphire Blue t-shirt. Without her black leather jacket on, Vivian’s demeanor had changed. She blew playfully in my ear, then said, “They kicked him out. You know how he gets.” Of course, I had no idea.

The Sapphire Blue Hotel and Casino was built in the desert just east of Bramble. It’s a bit shocking, topographically. The scientists at Bramble County Community College have studied this wasteland with few conclusions other than that the desert is spreading. You can’t blame the casino, but you could.

Sean Ennis is the author of Chase Us: Stories (Little A), Cunning, Baffling, Powerful (Thirty West), and Hope and Wild Panic (Malarkey Books). He lives in Water Valley, MS and more of his work can be found at seanennis.net