Discomfort at the Comfort Inn

Most of the Thanksgiving weight is gone, and I only had an orange for breakfast. By lunchtime I'm experiencing serious hunger, specific in that I want a bowl of chili. We don't keep stuff like that in the house, mostly because it is only fit to eat if there's a power failure and you are reduced to heating canned food in the fireplace.

Off to The 99, except they don't have chili so I settle for a pretty decent bowl of the New England version of Tortilla Soup. S.O. has a cheeseburger. We're talking about our Christmases as kids and what we remember, because the Brown Food Writing Course has unleashed a tsunami of memories, and I remember Christmas at my Grandma's in Kansas, in Kearney Nebraska, in McPherson Kansas, in Ft. Morgan, Colorado.

O.K., so I didn't have a Bright Lights, Big City childhood. At least we always had pleasant meals with cameraderie, not the hideous disfuncional kind that are grist for the writer's mill. What can I say? O.K. my mom and her brother argued politics, but very civilly.

So after a decent lunch and I have to tell you The 99 (The Ninety-Nine) serves LARGE glasses of wine, not the three little slurps you might get elsewhere, we toddle off.

Next door there's a "Comfort Inn," and two people are carrying something large out of the back. "Looks like a dead body," I say, half-joking. I am thinking they are removing an old rug, because the "parcel" is wrapped so strangely in what appears to be a brown container.

Except when we pull around and can actually see, there's a cop car sitting at the front door and the vehicle the "rug" is going into is actually a mortuary van. Therefore it must have been a body.

Some poor soul died at the motel. Heart attack? Stroke? Suicide? I don't think "murder" because there would be a gazillion cop cars. Probably. I think of the hotel maid who must have opened the room and discovered the corpse. Yikes. Not pleasant for her. I suppose they see it all and like none of it.

Must have been a man because the parcel was so long. I swear to you it did look like a big parcel. Like a rug.

We'll have to wait to read the paper next week, since local papers are never exactly johnny on the spot with the news and the paper is published tomorrow and must have long gone to press before the body was even cold.

Right before Christmas, too. A business traveller? Must be a story there. We writers can always imagine a story.

A small press actually asked to read "World of Mirrors" today. How do you like them apples?

Onward,

Grapeshot