The Writing Group (TWG)

Heavy curtains fell like old hair. Stained and stiff, they hung in front of window eyes.

Host to whores and lawyers, the beds of hotel had their clothes changed each day.

The walls heard the fights after barrooms had closed. On other days, they corralled sleeping children while parents visited one another beneath hotel’s sheets.

“No vacancy” had never been lit on the rusting sign that swung from steel chains.

Rats and roaches lived rent free in the bowels of hotel.

A boy committed suicide down the hall in number three. A bride and groom made love where the coroner had stood and hotel kept things quiet. Old soldiers saluted flags that flew in parades, and their tears were stirred by memories, in the avenues surrounding hotel.

On the roof, rotting shakes of shingles let water pool where it found depressions. The attic held the registers of years that had been.

Hornets built nests in a rafter; nailed there by drunken carpenters that had survived Pearl Harbor.

Carpets had been steamed until they bled of all blush. Hotel’s color TVs replaced the black and whites that had shown a president’s head explode. And those that were there, remembered were they were, in hotel.

Managers over the years embezzled from within. Thieves from the outside plundered as well, and hotel welcomed all through a gaunt front door. Sleep came in gangs to the souls in rented cells, while dirty cars stood idle in the lot.

Tonight a young girl cried by a candle's light, two blocks from hotel’s foundation. A wrecker’s ball had leveled hotel, and down with it came room ten. The room she had been born in, the day her mother died.

Hotel was taken away in pieces by trucks and men who were paid by the hour. Only two remembered hotel tonight, a young girl, and the old man who built it. He stared at the first key in the palm of his palsy hand, and she wept, holding the key to number ten.