The Photograph
an excerpt

Lena woke slowly to the sound of a fan whirring noisily somewhere to the left and behind her. She hated waking up. At least when she was sleeping she dreamed. Well, she thought she did anyway. She couldn’t be completely sure because in the heartbeat of time between sleep and wakefulness she remembered snippets of her dreams or, perhaps, her memories.

Memories were something she was sadly lacking lately. She wasn’t even sure Lena was her real name. It probably wasn’t. She saw the name on a comedy club poster stapled to a telephone pole outside the raunchy motel she had chosen last night. Maybe it was last night. She didn’t really know how long she had been here. At least this morning she remembered coming into the room. Yesterday when she woke up she didn’t even have that much. She had woken up to dead silence and no idea who she was, where she was, or how she had gotten there. Today was only marginally better. She at least had her memory of yesterday.

She climbed out of the sagging bed and padded over to the clothes she had tossed carelessly over the fold up chair before she went to bed last night. She looked at them and thought that she really did not want to put them on again. They were filthy, smelly, and only fit for burning. She wondered what could have compelled her to put them on in the first place. Today she would have to put them on because she simply had nothing else. Today she had precious little choice. The shower she suddenly wanted would have to wait until she had clean clothes.

She looked around for the bathroom and then remembered that the only bathroom was a shared bathroom at the end of the hallway. She decided she could hold it for a little while. She picked up the duffel bag she had set on the floor the night before and unzipped it again. It still surprised her to see the stacks of bills neatly confined in rubber bands with small slips of paper giving the count of each group. She remembered from counting it yesterday that there were bills of every denomination from ones to 100’s. She had no idea where it had come from, but today it would buy her some clean clothes to wear and upgrade her to a motel that did not have muddy water coming from the tap.

She pulled on the jeans and dirty white tank top, wrinkling her nose at the smell. She stuffed the sweatshirt into the duffel bag with the cash after she took several twenty dollar bills out of a stack and stashed them in her pockets. The only shoes she had were pink flip flops that looked like they had been pulled from the dumpster. Perhaps they had been.
She made a mental note to purchase new jeans, shirts, socks, shoes, underwear, definitely deodorant, shampoo, definitely duffel bag. She knew her odor was going to offend the sales clerks but there was nothing she could do about that until she was in a nicer motel. She made the bed; habit she supposed and ran her fingers through her long hair. She wished there was something she could do with it, but it would have to do.

As soon as she opened the door, she peeked down the hall and went to the front desk. The woman at the desk barely glanced at her as she took the twenty Lena placed in her hand.

“Coming back?”

“No” Lena answered as she walked toward the front door.

“That’s what you said five days ago” the woman muttered. “Can’t seem to make up your mind.”