Floating Hotel

by Grace Curtis

displaced people whose brief lives were made bearable with substances that shortened them. Many dwelled there but nobody was really at home.

Every job in hospitality is the hardest job in hospitality. If you’re not physically exhausted at the end of the day, you’re emotionally wrung-out, or braindead from making too many decisions. Everyone looks at everyone else with envy, wishing they could smile more or think less or sit down from time to time.

Fretting about death is an aristocrat’s pastime, she thought. The rest of us are too busy trying to live.

That was Ooly Mall’s experience of adulthood: realizing that a lot of what he’d been told was about will power was actually about adaptability. He could do most of what other people did, but he had to do it his own way, in his own 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.