Sunday Short: Hotels by Josephine Rowe

I normally try to get these to you much earlier in the day, but this one escaped me unfortunately. My weekend's been a little explosive. I've recommended Josephine Rowe before, but she's stilll fresh in my head after NYWF so you can have another one. It's Rowe's prose, more than anything else, that makes her such an exquisite read.  Her ability to swell up intense bouts of emotion in such short pieces of writing is a skill I admire so, so much.

They drink steadily in the first few days. Glasses stationed around the room with dried half-moons of lime in the bottom. So hot out that the tint is blistering off the windows of cars in the street. But that is out in the great, dusty world that they are not a part of for the moment. The insides of the hotels are cool and stark, and there is nothing to remind them of themselves. Their luggage lost in the mirrored halls of wardrobes. The bed a vast white plane where nothing terrible has ever happened, where they lie naked on the bright sheets and he tries to lift the bruise from her face with remedies he has heard or read about. Butter, honey, kaffir lime. And although she knows none of it will work, she smiles and lets him. The bruise remains and blackens, but they wake each morning to clean light with only the slightest recollection of the dreams they have climbed out of.

Hotels is a lovely short, and one you can check out over at the Meanjin website.