The bed sheets were rolled up in the corner of the room, a yellow ball of fiber that used to be white, but was now soiled by the seven-year-old boy who stayed here with his parents. They were always screaming at him every time I passed their door, shouting “stop it!” and “no more!” with cigarette voiceboxes. I didn’t blame them for being agitated. A three-night stay in a one-bedroom room here cost a couple thousand dollars. And I’m sure they didn’t go on vacation to smell piss every morning.
I walked over to the corner, bent down, gripped the ball with two hands, and slowly rose up the way the physical therapist taught me. A waft of piss filled my nostrils as the sheets sat damp and heavy in my gloved palms. I felt the urge to squeeze all the urine out of the fiber, to make it stainless again, but I resisted. I peered at my cart wedged in the doorway and chucked the ball across the room. It landed at the bottom of the wagon with a wet thud. Out of sight out of mind.
Next was the bathroom. Swirls of thick black hair clumped to the drain of the shower. I entered it. Instead of picking up the glob with a microfiber or dustpan, I grabbed it with my fingers, rolling it around my palm until it became one tight ball. I thought of shampoo hiding in it. Or spit. Or cum. Or pee. Fear-in-the-belly pee that pained the intestines and bloated the abdomen.
A rhythmic buzzing erupted in my pocket. The ringing of my manager, Leanne. I pulled out my phone, held it up to my lips, and put the call on speaker. “Hello?” I whispered as sweetly as possible; as softly as my voice could sound. She liked soft voices.
“Did you mop the floors on the first floor?”
Leanne also liked cutting to the chase. “Not yet. But I will do that as soon as I am done with room thirty-nine.”
“Please do that before you go to lunch.”
“My lunch is in thirty minutes.”
“I moved your lunch to one.” Her deep voice reminded me of the Skittles the popular girls in middle school would crush into their water, sour while sneaking in sweetness. “Also, if you see any snacks in the rooms, bag them up and put them in my office at the end of the day. I skipped my grocery run last night.”
I bit the insides of my cheeks. They should have been used to my molars by now——impenetrable. Yet the skin still bled for Leanne.
“Okay,” I nodded.
She didn’t say bye——only hung up the phone. I slipped it back into my pocket, standing still amidst the heart in my ribcage pumping red into my eyes, my chest flushing in the reflection of the shower door. I hated my skin pink. Leanne wore pink everyday. Pink blouses, pink pants, pink hair ties that made her look like a thirty-year-old kindergartener. She did this, my brain seethed. She loves seeing me pink. Pink as a baby you could crush with two fingers.
This room was not the only thing that needed wiping out.
A sizzling sound from the other room crept through the doorway, melting the invisible ice around my legs. I left the bathroom. On the bed closest to the window laid a skeleton, a blackened, headless skeleton wrapped in a rose gold robe. Escaping from the shadows of the headboard where its head should have been was a yellow python, curling and hissing out of the base of its neck, corkscrewing across its chest. It traveled down its body until it came between its feet, opening its pink mouth to reveal violin strings of saliva red as blood.
I smiled at the serpent. “Missed your grocery run last night, Lee?”
It nodded its head slightly.
“Are you hungry?”
It nodded again.
“I have just the thing for you.”
I raised the clump of shower hair in the air, striding to the creature. It hissed approvingly, its trunk rising off the bed to greet my hand. When I held the clump of hair inches over its head, it shot up to receive the wet mass in its sharp jaws. Hot satisfaction filled my core when a tiny lump traveled under its thin skin to its stomach.
“Out of sight out of mind,” I whispered. Before I could contemplate feeding the snake the piss towel, my phone rang again. This time, it was Gloria, the manager from building four. I hit the call button.
“Hello?”
“Hi, dear. It’s Gloria. I just want to inform you that Leanne got a stomach bug and left the resort to rest. I will be taking over your building for the remainder of the day. Let me know when you want to go to lunch and I will clock you out.”
My smirk grew so wide that I almost forgot to empathize. “Oh, no! I hope she’s okay! Tell her that I’m keeping her in my thoughts. I’ll let you know when I am about to go eat.”
“Will do, dear. It was so sudden. She just started vomiting into a trashcan. Poor thing. Keep me posted if you need anything.”
“Of course. Thank you.”
“Thank you.”
With that “thank you” growing the seed of my ego, the python circled around my black sneakers.
Et gratias tibi ago, it spoke.
Its skin now black as a raven’s coat.
Samantha Szumloz is a poet, flash fiction writer, editor, and Best Small Fictions nominee based in Hamilton Township, New Jersey. She has been published in places such as The Talon Review, Blue Marble Review, Rawhead, and MORIA. The name of Samantha’s villainous secret identity is “Everlurker.”
