The first hotel I ever got kicked out of was a Holiday Inn off I-90 in South Dakota, a four-story cube of beige, surrounded by nothing but truck stops and this one defunct waterpark with a partly melted-off T-Rex out front. I got fired from my first ever night-shift job on the grounds of “serial lateness,” after, according to my manager, I’d tried, and failed, to clock my power naps between guest check-ins and laundry runs, which meant my only recourse was to squat in a suite that one of the previous guests had abandoned with a broken television and a dozen VHS tapes of the local news, marked between years 2000 and 2005. My manager, Rhonda, wore a loose bun and a name tag with an embossed cross, and she caught me eating cold waffles straight from the housekeepers’ cart at four in the morning, sitting cross-legged in the hallway in my uniform vest and socks, watching the snow pile up against the emergency exit. I tried to tell her I was conducting an audit of the lost and found section, and she laughed then said, “It’s like they left behind all this stuff so as to stay here forever,” and I looked at her imploringly. She let me have five minutes to collect my things, which was generous considering it was more than what she’d given me when I first started working here, so I stuffed my duffel bag with tiny bottles of shampoo and the weirdest VHS tape I could find in the pile: some guy screaming into the camera about wheat prices while being surrounded by a gaggle of baby lemurs (or what I take for baby lemurs as all lemurs look baby-like to me). As I walked out, Rhonda handed me a plastic-wrapped cinnamon roll and told me, “Don’t let the T-Rex bite you on your way out,” which I realized was the only meaningful advice she’d given me all year. I slept in my car until the storm cleared, eating cold cinnamon rolls and watching the blinking hotel sign flicker between “D AY INN” and “W AY OUT,” until, in my half-dreams, it just read “IN,” and I thought maybe I’d finally arrived somewhere worth staying, or at least somewhere that would let me rest until the next checkout.
Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Wigleaf, Pithead Chapel, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected as finalists for the Los Angeles Review Short Fiction Prize and the Passages North Waasnode Short Fiction Prize. His work has been selected or nominated for several anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. He edits the literary journal The Bulb Region. He can be found online @sarpsozdinler or at www.sarpsozdinler.com