PS_Fall_2014_PS Summer 8/21/14 10:45 PM Page 15
m a r y
m c m y n e
CAMILLE
Detroiter by Jerry C. Smith © 2014 hey honeymooned in a one-star Mississippi motel: a three-story dingy cube beside an asphalt lot scattered with El Caminos and Volkswagens, notable only for the towering neon sign spelling its name in phosphorescent pink glass tubes – S-U-N K-I-S-T, like the citrus – and the seven letters she bet always blinked beneath – V-A-C-A-N-C-Y. Originally, they had planned to drive all the way from Grand Isle to Florida, but they never made it because they got sick of driving – or, more accurately, because Odell’s fingers had been sending a tingling sensation and a string of goose
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bumps up her thigh since the LouisianaMississippi border. By the time he suggested they stop in Pass Christian, she wanted nothing more. She laughed when he pointed at the vacancy sign blinking over the Sun Kist, and she laughed even harder when he drove over the railroad tracks into the lot. And so it was that their son was conceived in Room 301 under the neon pink glow of that sign, while the wind off the dirty Gulf floated molecules of salt and seawater she could taste through the open balcony door. And so it is that, today, on the first anniversary of that night, Mrs. Odell LeBlanc is weaving through traffic into the lot.
Her knuckles white against the steering wheel, she sighs: at the glare of the sun off the dash, the tilt of the second C in VACANCY, which has in the past year all but fallen from the sign. The motor whines as she parks the car. She hurries through the black parking lot toward the office, jumping at the bell that rings as she opens the door. The receptionist sits behind a desk, legs crossed, seashell-pink lips shimmering as she smiles lazily from beneath her monstrous beehive. Everything in the office is dark brown, apart from the linoleum floor. A fan on the desk oscillates. Pale threads of hair snaking up the
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