Intersection Set #7

The wind raises dust-devils in the dirt parking lot that serves as the courtyard of the motel. The motel itself is a bleak two-story structure faced in white vinyl tattooed by wind driven sand and dust. U-shaped, it curves around the courtyard forming a natural trap for the wind, dust, vehicles, people. The wind is between 20 and 30 knots and the song is made of sibilant consonants forming the syllables of ten thousand different words, the remnants of a million conversations upwind, torn up and scattered, like the dust in the parking lot. As the wind abates before the next gust, an occasional vowel is formed, tempting me to completion. Wrought-iron railings show undulations from guests and chambermaids standing outside the rooms taking smoke breaks, hunched against the wind. I test the railing for myself and give credence to the scenes where the prisoner bends the bars with bare hands and snakes to freedom. There is a tattooed and pierced young woman sitting in her car, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She is talking on the phone, laughing and smiling, but there are lines of deep skepticism around her eyes. The building shudders and rattles in the wind and the vent in the bathroom howls like Slim Harpo as the sand swirls like driven snow across the woman's windshield.


Late at night, the wind dies and the air is still. Occasionally the sound of a jake brake, a guttural clearing of the mechanical throat, signals the proximity of the highway. The building shakes with the lovemaking of the couple in the room below me. The sodium lights in the parking lot take up a dirty-yellow song where the vent left off.