Member-only story
Snowy Creek Motel
The tale of room number 9
Bradley Wilkins pulled his rent-a-car into the gravel parking lot of the Snowy Creek Motel. Below the motel’s sign was a smaller sign that read, “Snowy Creek Motel: 10,872 feet in altitude.”
After many hours of driving through the desert, Bradley was glad to be up in the clouds, so to speak. Anyone who lives in the desert pines for the top of mountains. When, from the valley floor, one looks up at the mountain peaks on a daily basis those mountain peaks become a distant place that, unlike Heaven, is accessible to humans who are still alive and in bodies. An entirely different reality is just a few hours drive away.
It had been around thirty years since Bradley had been to the Snowy Creek Motel. He had no intention of securing a room. He just wanted to sit in the parking lot and stare at the motel.
Sitting in the rent-a-car with his hands still on the steering wheel, Bradley remembered way, way back to when he was a nineteen-year-old idiot who had just married a nineteen-year-old woman. After the make-shift wedding they only had one common day off from work so that one day became their honeymoon.
And where did they spend that incredibly brief honeymoon? They drove up out of the valleys to the mountaintops and a night at the Snowy Creek Motel. Room number 9.
