Every motel has stories. Percy's Motor Inn just has a few extra.

    Like the time that albino gnawed through the wall of 108. He looked
albino when it happened, anyway. A few years later when he came back to
apply for a job, he was only slightly wan. Sickly but like he had it
dealt with.

    The handprints on the south wall of the pool area are still there. Not
much to that story except that they can't be cleaned off. A boy licked
them on a bet once and maybe nothing happened to him.

    The desk closes for a few minutes around 7pm, because people who check
in right exactly then have turned out to be trouble. Mostly fistfights.
One guy who could see through skin and was bothering people about it. Two
women with unfriendly cars, on two separate occasions. The salesman might
have been a 7 o'clock customer, in fact. Anyway, more trouble than they're
worth.

    Then there's the tiling in the lobby, the big mosaic section. It's
really nothing, viewed with the proper detachment, but nobody likes to
feel uncomfortable. Some cultures teach people to fear that sort of thing,
and Percy's gets visitors from all over, so some yellowish lights were put
in to make certain colors blur together.

    All sorts of problems have been fixed with a stay in 203. Mental prob-
lems, that is. One guest had some very sharp words with the desk staff on
the subject of how being sane felt, so now, as silly as it sounds, nobody
gets checked in to 203 without an explanation and the chance to switch
rooms. One night won't do it but two's usually plenty.

    Loose change found lying anywhere in the motel demands a call to the
manager. Right away, no exceptions.

    One of the exterior stairwells has had a chiming sound in it since the
night Princess Diana died. At the beginning it was more like music; now
it's just two notes, back and forth. The salesman couldn't hear it, funny
enough.

    A bird-man came in once, waving his little bag around everywhere. They
checked him in and later he showed people the bag was full of teeth. The
bird part could have just been a costume; some folks like attention.

    And for that matter the crawling lady, nobody ever did get an explan-
ation out of her. Perfectly normal otherwise, happy to talk about most
things. She stayed for a while, maybe even moved between rooms to help the
desk out.

    Hugo always gets first pick of shifts because he figured out what the
salesman was up to before anybody else had given the guy a second glance.
A good eye matters a lot at Percy's. Hugo also knows all the hand gestures
to get into the attic storage rooms, if anyone forgets their key.

    There's an elderly couple who check into 105 once a year. It changes
exactly when, but it's always a day when they can get piles of salmon off
the docks. If they ask anyone to help them with it, they tip well.

    One last thing, 202 still needs most of the extra coats of paint taken
off. That's the salesman's old room. Chemicals don't work; chipping away
does but it's slow. The grain of all the wood in there runs in one direc-
tion, and that's the way to face to stay safe while stripping paint. Do
that, and it's totally safe.

    It's nice here. Nobody gets that at first. It just is.

written for Christopher Rovegno in my living room 9/12/08

Christopher sent in 15 words, which is just totally against the rules; I picked 10. (An eleventh, "pursy venus", gave the motel its name but wasn't really used or in fact understood.) Sorry for skipping the hard ones, Chris!

Little things:

I decided to avoid putting "I" or "you" explicitly into the story even after I realized I wanted it to be an employee orientation rather than just a bunch of local folklore. (Arguably I tripped up at the end by putting "Do that..." in imperative form.)

The salmon part got botched because I didn't actually pick out one line of thought before typing-- do they buy lots of salmon (colloquial "piles") or are they scavenging it from the trash? The former really isn't weird at all (fresh salmon is great!) and the latter requires someone to throw away good fish for no reason. So that's dumb. Something similar happened with the sentence structure, though not the idea, of the bit after it about paint.

On the actual printed page, none of the paragraphs have blank lines between them. In the past, I've frequently tried to make a simple paragraph break do the work of an empty line, and while I post stories here as written, basically unedited, this felt like fixing a typo (which I happily do nowadays) rather than sneaking in a leisurely do-over on something I committed to while the clock was ticking (not okay).

I do like a few of these ideas a lot, and might even steal them back from myself later.

- everything is by Aaron Mandel; please ask first if you're about to steal something -

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