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It was a small hotel, only four or five stories high, set in the middle of the block in a quiet street of a small Midwestern town: Bentonville. The hotel seemed to have no name, at least all the sign over the front door said was “Hotel,” and under that “Day-week-month.” Most of the guests in the hotel were regulars, renting by the month and taking their meals three times a day in the small dining room, once very well furnished but now slowly disintegrating into a fine powder of molding carpets and dusty velvet drapes.
At one time it had been one of the best hotels in town, but the city center had passed on by as the town grew, and instead of the local elite, the hotel now catered to several old ladies and a few younger people, mostly single and in between more permanent lodgings.
The desk clerk was a fairly new addition to the hotel, having been hired only a couple of years ago, but somehow he managed to look as if he had been sitting behind the long walnut counter ever since the hotel was built, almost growing out of the honeycombed latticework of the mail boxes behind him, like some sea creature anchored in coral. His coloring was dark, nearly matching in the dim light the worn shiny wood that framed his little cubicle.
Fictional reading for entertainment purposes only.