In Between at the Stretch Motel
by
Audrey Sizemore

There is an air of inevitability at the Stretch Motel. This inevitability is a specific knowledge: one with which we can identify when we approach Francine’s place, when we see the end of our personal viable contribution. This is where we get older, and our bodies degrade. Or maybe we’re like Mr. Vogel and we smell death up close and personal, watching our child die of leukemia. We know that this, today, is one present moment that rolls into the next, and the next, until finally there are no moments left. We’re always in between and waiting. Until we aren’t.

I feel this inevitability as the late, late autumn sun lowers in the sky and I feel the disconcerting, disjointed sense that the sun should be in a different place. It’s too far south, and that movement always happens faster than it should, it seems to me. The holiday lights try to keep it at bay, but the warmer season is smothering in the darker cold. This time of tilting away, between full sun and pale noontimes, is the best season to write of liminality. That sort of uncertain weather is present in The Stretch Motel. The wind from the semi-trucks is a late autumn wind; one that speaks not of before and not of next, but of change that will never come and always come, as it repeats again and again. The wind blasts by a town that is stuck between the locales of the filthy rich and the dirty poor, unsure of its identity.

Jimmy’s metal band T-shirt is a token of those places. These perpetually autumn-stricken borderlands aren’t the elite city, or the wholesome homestead, or the destitute slums of sleeping bodies. No, Metallica is for the suburban middle-class who are caught in a narrative where “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” is their soundtrack. Their madness can’t be spoken. They smoke Newports because Camels and Marlboros are too ritzy, and Basics are beneath them. Those packs of nicotine are of the in-between variety.

But even these middle places have edges, barely felt before you get to the next middle place. These borderlands have a strange openness to them – the kind of openness you don’t want in a cozy home place. You don’t want to feel as though you’ll fall off the edge of your map when you should be in the comfort zone. Yet you feel that uneasiness at the Stretch Motel. You can sense here, more than in any other place, that these places can’t keep you safe. They are only a staging area – one that never ends for some, until you wink out of existence. The staging areas are a gateway to nothing else – only a lack of what we hunt: peace, closure, achievement, rightness. The balance we try to achieve slips out when you drift into these towns. They are an end but never a beginning. Jimmy feels an instinct to hold on to a scrap of balance when he sees Francine with the rabbit. He agrees to help her feed the abandoned creature because what else can he do? It won’t hold the end at bay any later than it decides to arrive, but maybe he can help her have a moment of peace in the wasteland of the in-between.

Jimmy knows this only by instinct, as he is not yet really in his own life, and he’s no longer a child. He doesn’t comprehend Francine’s helpless, hopeless monologue. He can’t comprehend yet – all he’s known are his parents house and an education he’s not using. He’s neither a child nor an adult, but he sees this morph forced upon him with every room he cleans. Which brochure does he place on top now? Is he finding salvation or sin or satiation? What do they mean, anyway?

We are always caught under something and trying to eke out another thing, or as Jimmy elegantly puts it, “fortressing ourselves against the forces of nature and technology, contemplating our shared humanity and shit” (Kruse, 3). He is already discovering that the only saving grace that the multiverse offers us is other humans, as we search for meaning between our host star and hostile space, between miracles and madness.

Cosmological grace aside, Francine speaks the truth because Death is coming for us all. Though she knows this, she doesn’t want it. She tries to give this truth to Jimmy, but he doesn’t understand it in the visceral way she does. Yet.

“The Stretch Motel” is from Tales From the Liminal, Copyright 2021 S. K. Kruse, Deuxmers Publishing