Chapter 7: The Coat Room

Chapter 7: The Coat Room

(Zxvasdf, June 1st, 2011)

The coat room is warm and cloying, tended-to by irate dwarves8 who amble between rows of meticulously tagged articles of clothing. The coat room is also large and drafty and tended to by torpid titans. The coat room is what you need it to be.

A bewildering array of clothing is herded by a coat tender who holds out his palm when he has snagged your choice ensemble. Very rarely has a coat gone wrong on a different set of shoulders upon whence it came.

Sometimes one might decide not to use a coat valet and instead set out to discover their coat for themselves. Such prospects are for fools. Quite often they wander for days like travelers lost in parking garages, suffering meager sustenances from crumbs found in pockets and the roast of an occasional vermin using purloined lighters and scraps of paper and cash for fuel. Very few return, and on many occasions bleached bones of owners are found mere yards from their coats.

But the coat room is an effective and necessary service for guests of our wonderful house.9

8

The plural ‘Dwarves’, though attested in scattered use “as early as 1818” according to scholarly sources, is most associated with the fantasy writing of J. R. R. Tolkien; in modern usage, it is sometimes used to clarify that one is referring to the mythical race of humanoid beings, and not to non-magical human beings of unusually short stature.

This is the first use of the phrase “our wonderful house”, or indeed of a first person plural in the narration,

9

within the text of the novel, should one choose not to consider ‘Welcome!’ as being properly a part of the text. 21