Ghost Town: Population 102.  In the black stormy night, the roadside sign flashes white under a black sedan’s high beams.  Over in town, 5 minutes down the road, Richie the innkeeper is making some chamomile tea—sleep is elusive when you’re afraid of dying.  For that fear he is staying the night on his living room couch, whether or not that includes falling asleep.  The specific means of death he fears, he is not so sure, but he saw an evergreen tree get taken down the last time there was a storm this bad.  

The tree landed right next to Tony’s house, right in his fucking driveway.  “I guess God wants me to appreciate my Time more, huh?” he asked Richie with a toothy grin that day.  Richie had pulled over in front of Tony’s when he noticed the near-calamity, stricken with awe at the inches away it was from hitting the house, and at the age of the tree in question. 

“My grandpa said that tree was standing tall even when he was a short one!” was all Richie could answer.  

“Yeah, well, must’ve been all dried up inside the trunk, maybe termites or something got at it—been eaten by something inside-out somehow or another, just one day out the blue sent falling from a storm.  It’s a shame, it was a good tree.”  One which had almost killed him; he always had been particularly optimistic.  

Richie was not as much and, having not a single guest for 2 months, found himself wondering again about selling the inn.  About moving to a city, fantasizing of a world where you go outside the front door and immediately are among human beings, strange human beings, not the monotonous ones you know like the back of your hand.  Where you don’t need another empty hello or how are you or did you get your mail yet or how’s the inn going?  He wants anonymity, something he thought he bought when he purchased the place with his entire net worth 24 years ago; and he also, now, yearns to be where the sounds of human life would drown out the screaming sound of rain, no matter how hard it was pouring.  He wishes he heard neighbors above him instead of a silent second floor and a roof that could be torn off, ripped to pieces by a hurricane.

He hears an engine, and that moment the lightning flash merges with the high beams through his windows, nearly blinding him as he turns his head to locate the source of the sound.  When he turns away from the light, the turning car’s beams cast a monstrous molting shadow of Richie onto his living room white-painted wall in front of him, before returning him to darkness.  He gets on shoes and a coat and runs to the door, making his way to the inn right next to his house—the only two buildings for at least 3 miles in either direction.  A lady comes out of the black sedan after parking it in front of the inn’s front door.  Her car’s windows are tinted.

All she’s wearing is a black gown.  In the few steps to the front door she is soaked, and so is Richie, as he struggles to jam the key in the locked door to the office to get it open for them both.  When he gets inside and turns on the light, he is stunned at her eyes—how they’re so dark, the iris and pupil seem like two solid black marbles floating on white pools.  He considers if she is on drugs, maybe some hallucinogen’s effect upon her eyes would give such an illusion in this century-old lighting.  He has her sign her name in the book under room 101—she pays cash upfront and the signature is unintelligible.  As he locks the door behind them both, he leaves her with, “If you need anything at all, any problems with the room or something, just ring my doorbell, I’ll be in the house right across the lot over there.  Alright?  You have a good-night ma’am.”

He turns towards his house, and when he starts making his way there he hears the woman behind him, “Have a good-night, Richie.”