Floating Hotel

by Grace Curtis

populated by displaced people whose brief lives were made bearable with substances that shortened them.

Class, the story goes, cannot be purchased. This is not strictly true. Money is an integral piece of the puzzle. The difference is that, in the case of class, money is a means to an end. It is not the end itself.

The hotel was not designed by committee. It was the work of singular vision. It looked like something somebody loved.

A useful thing about Mataz was that he always had the worst case scenario poised at the end of his trimmed fingertips.

“Promise me you’ll never hurt me.” A speech as grand as a fountain bubbled up inside him, an explosion of poetry listing all the things he would do to protect her from harm. But she didn’t like speeches. So he only said, “I promise.”

Then again, who am I to judge?, he thought with a wry smile. I’m an imperial spy, and I cry alone all the time.

You think you can’t hurt anymore, but you hurt a little worse each day. You think you can’t take anymore, but you do, you keep taking it. You think it’ll kill you, but somehow it doesn’t. And then what? Life demands to be lived. So live she did, day by day. Quietly. Alone.