Checking In by Frederick K Foote

She was the craggy-faced, big-boned, broken-nose blonde on the ripe side of 50 working the night shift at the front desk at the small New Hampshire Hotel.

He materialized in front of her. Didn’t use the front door like normal. Just appeared black, so black, impossibly black. Maybe seven feet tall.

His blackness obscured his height, weight, and size. The blackness was overwhelming, compressing her, denying her air, her space.

It wasn’t his race that shifted her toward madness. Her boyfriend at Harvard for her senior year was Black. She had dated other Black, Asian, White, and unknown ethnicity/race men and women.

She could not avert her eyes. She found her voice but barely recognized it. “How can I help you?”

Her eyes said, “I’m helpless before you. What the fuck do you want? Are you for fucking real? Are you death? Are you here for me?”

His eyes replied with contempt, anger, mild disgust, affection, and yearning. Plus, something she couldn’t understand, translate, or comprehend.

She was 13 years old and overheard her father describe her. “My dear Charlotte, beauty has avoided her in all of its factors and forms.”

That statement, declaration, and description destroyed her—and became her platform for existence. How could her father have ever said that about her?

“A room for the night.” His voice, like his blackness, was too loud to comprehend. It echoed and echoed throughout the hotel, blasting out windows, bursting eardrums, destroying crystal and fine China—or not. Maybe it was a pleasing, mellow baritone.

She was 15, and helping her father clean the gutters, she emptied the bucket of leaves and muck. A wasp stung him on the wrist. He fell from the ladder, flat on his back, flattened her. His right hand on her left breast broadcast need, lust, poison passion, and horrifying invitations to unspeakable conclusions. He leaped up and fled, leaving a connection and a void between them that day that they never addressed. He didn’t even help her up. Did he ever touch her again? Did he ever? Did she ever crave that touch again?

And the blackness before her evaporated to room 302. How did that happen? She put out the “Back in 15 minutes.” sign, grabbed her purse, and raced to the staff bathroom. She emptied her bowels and stomach completely and swiftly and rubbed away her tears. Closeted her fears.

Looked at herself, the sallow stranger, in the mirror. It hit her in the chest like a fist in an iron glove and shattered something in her. The thing at the front desk was not human. It was not even black. It was in disguise, disgusting, terrifying, threatening, demanding, demeaning, imperial, impossible. Maybe it was her father, dead ten years, or his emissary. Definitely not human. Positively alien.

A little lip gloss? A makeup touch-up? No! It didn’t care about things like that. What did it care about? What did it want from her?

Her dying father whispered in her ear, “I’m glad I…” Was the blackness here to finish, answer, or explain that statement?

At room 302, she raised her hand to knock, but the door opened before her fist could land. She stepped into the impenetrable blackness and hoped that it was just death coming for her. She prayed it was only her death at hand.

Frederick K Foote

Image: Small, grey hotel reception desk from Google images.