Marco Polo | Edie Meade
Sound reemerged: shrieks of monkeys warning of explorers. “Mar-co.” Sherbet light through the eyelids, floaters waltzing like ladies on a lake. When Sherry opened her eyes, they pirouetted to the edges and sang in chorus: “Po-lo.” They waited for her to ice over again. But Sherry was thawed hot now, coming to in a hotel. Naked under the powdering ceiling, she surveyed its sharp corners, one blinking smoke detector eye. Wall-mounted heater kicked up to 85. Metal door pierced by monkey cries. Gradually the pattern emerged, converged: “Mar-co.” “Po-lo.” A hotel with a pool. Those were closer to the interstate exits than the cheap places along the strip. A nice place, where the guys with wives, day jobs take their girls.
She laid reflective as a jungle pool. What was his name? Not Marco. Randall. With the powder that had transported them to this wild place. She’d gotten into the car with him the day before – or had it been two days already? – intending to get him all fixed up and then go back with the other girls. But he had sad eyes and more cash than the usual guy. Allegedly single, soft-handed, professional. Where had he gone?
She looked down her body, her breasts rising and falling, hiding, revealing a framed and fluorescent Randall, foraging in the bathroom.
Naked, too, he regarded himself in the mirror, and without tightening his stomach as men did when they knew they were being observed, bent over what he was snorting off the sink. The black hair of his chest grew together in a gorilla seam that ran down his crotch and back up the other side, clear up to the nape of his neck where his hair came to a point. Gorillas always had such sad eyes.
He stood erect and arched for a backward dive, eyes rolled up as though he heard the ladies of the lake singing, too. Then he pivoted toward her, banged back and forth in the bathroom doorframe like an animal in a zoo enclosure, and dropped somewhere below her line of sight.
Sherry sat up to see him slumped chin to chest, hairy hands limp in his lap. Randall allegedly without a wife. His chest moved gentle as a boat in still water. Always these white collar guys who wanted to shack up at the interstate hotels so far from town she had to call somebody to come get her. It was time for her to get going.
“Marco,” a lone scream echoed in from the pool. A rush of blood in her ears submerged the sound when she leaned over to pull on her leggings. She grabbed Randall’s wallet from the bedside table, bargained with his driver’s license for her due. Such sad eyes. “Polo,” sang the pool chorus as she slipped from the room.
Edie Meade is a writer, artist, and mother of four in Huntington, West Virginia. Recent work can be found in Atlas & Alice; The Normal School; Feral; Still: The Journal, and elsewhere. Say hi on Twitter @ediemeade or https://ediemeade.com/.