44-45 Years Old

Days pass slowly when you’re a small black pebble. A year drags.

The maid comes in, she cleans around me. They haven’t rented my room out yet. She’s cleaning it for me. They don’t know where I am, but money keeps coming out of my bank account into theirs. When you get transformed into a black pebble by a Hotel brochure, they still keep your bank account open.

Joe, the hotel owner comes in every Tuesday. He likes to pick me up and rub an area on my black-pebble surface that would once have been my throat. He rubs it gently at first, but then he starts to press quite hard with his thumb. And I feel like I’m choking. I want to shout

‘I might be a pebble, Joe, but it doesn’t mean I can’t feel you crushing me.’

But I can’t. I am a shiny black pebble.

After a while, Joe puts me back on the mirrored desk and picks up one of the other three black pebbles and he rubs them. He looks anxious about something. It’s impossible to know whether he realises we all used to be people before we became black pebbles.

One Tuesday he stays extra long and he rubs me over and over again across the ridge of his lip. Where it goes from skin to lip, Joe is almost as smooth as me. He is interrupted by the maid. She startles him and he drops me.

‘I’m going to start renting this damn room again.’ he tells her. ‘If there’s any of that guy’s crap left in here, you can keep it.’ The maid nods. She looks very tired. As Joe passes her to leave the room, she raises one of her hands towards him, but then lets it drop back by her side.

The first guest has just arrived. A chubby-ish man with mouse brown hair. The first thing he does is dump off his t-shirt and walk around topless. He’s quite hairy.

The t-shirt landed on the mirrored desk and if I squint, I can just make out the word

B-O-R-I-N-G

written on it. He orders some room service. He says ‘My Mum is paying.’