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Short fiction: “The Old Saloon Hotel”
It felt good to check in and decompress after what had been a full but pleasant day so far, the wrath of newly-pregnant teen(?) mothers notwithstanding. I spent a short while puttering around my suite — unpacking just those things that needed to be unpacked, checking out the bathroom to see if there were real bars of soap rather than the usual perfumed toy bars of soap that barely lather, and making a last-minute shopping list.
Said shopping list included: junk food, a six-pack of beer, and a real bar of soap that lathers like a cackling madman in heat.
Afterwards, I descended the creeky old wooden stairs to the smoke-filled barroom below, where men in top hats were puffing on cigars and toasting the marvels of an inevitable steam-powered future. These exact same men were here back in 1993, and reportedly for untold decades before that.
With the tracks having been gone for generations, it’s safe to say that the next train to Prussian Occupation has been canceled until further notice. But these self-made men were the barons of the lumber industry in their day, and so they know a thing or two about perseverance.
I pushed through the swinging saloon doors, took in a full lung of late afternoon air, and said hello to the white-gloved ladies in their ankle-length dresses sitting on the saloon’s front porch…
