I love the little pink soap in its shiny white wrapper that I place on the gleaming porcelain sink of Room 118. I scrub every memory from the bathtub and soon the bathroom smells only of my pine-scented cleaner.
I try to forget the woman who occupied this room, the one who told me to “fuck off” when I knocked ever so gently. Later, she stomped out in her wrinkled dress, followed by her hang-dog lover, whose eyes never left the floor. They left me with the smell of whiskey and passion. I vacuum and dust away their sweat and moans. I erase them as if they had never existed.
As I survey my finished work, satisfied, a man pushes past my cart and says, “Where is my wife? I know she was here.”
I block his path. “This room is freshly cleaned, sir, there is nothing to see.
Bonnie Brewer-Kraus is a former architect who lives in Cleveland Heights near Lake Erie, the Great Lake with the largest amount of shipwrecks. She is a member of Literary Cleveland and a volunteer reader for The Gordon Square Review. Her fiction and essays can be found in River and South Review, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Coffin Bell, and CommuterLit, among others.
