Kyle’s Story 3: Problems with Similes and Smiles

His parents step away from the front desk, his dad is sliding his platinum card back inside his alligator skin wallet. The two saunter over toward Kyle. They are grim-faced, conjoined in a tacit silence. His dad, like a walking tree, hovers above him, seemingly casting a shadow over the entire lobby. His dad’s eyes are a bit bloodshot. Perhaps he’d been crying. Or taking the pills again. Kyle knows his dad takes pills, injections sometimes, too.

His dad nods his heavy stone of a head. Kyle nods back in assent and rises, feeling airless, as if his lungs were punctured. Terror seizes him. The hairs on the back of his neck prickle.

It’s time. It’s time to go to the house. He’s been dreading this moment. He’d thought of going to a relative’s. He’d thought of staying with a friend. He’d thought of running away. He’d thought of so many ways to escape this moment. He’d wanted to escape the house, the ghosts, even before he’d stepped foot inside.

But now, they move. They walk. Bodies in motion. Right foot, left foot. Their bodies in lockstep. A bellboy is pushing a golden cart with the family’s bags. The bellboy, a short late-middle-aged man of possible Arab descent, is smiling his own version of the hotel’s plastic, toothy smile. The bellboy looks like he’s hurting his lips, stretching his mouth that wide. The beaming bellboy is making forced, painful small talk about the weather, emphatically proclaiming that it’d cooled down, that fall was here.