by Dawn Miller

I remember the motel on the outskirts of town—brown-bricked and unexceptional, the neon sign by the highway missing the “L”. I remember the first-floor room I shared with my parents, two double beds, so much room in mine I could sleep sideways; the familiar clunk of the vending machine outside the door—Mountain Dew, Coke, Orange Crush—and the clever little box on the night table that, for a quarter, made the bed shake like an earthquake, and I’d lie sprawled on the bedspread, sheet corners tucked hospital-style, and stare at the stippled ceiling, brain and limbs jangling.

It was the summer after my sister died, humidity a second skin, the newly built house my father bought sight unseen still weeks from ready—the one he bought to be closer for my sister’s treatments at the children’s hospital in Toronto—and my mother lined up cleaning products in small brown boxes under the motel room’s windows, doubles of Pledge, Windex, the acrid scent of Pine-Sol and Mr. Clean wafting.

Outside, a spiral staircase twisted from the ground to the second floor, rusted metal stairs that shook as Fatima, the motel owner’s daughter, and I panted up and down—swapping roles as towered princess and horsebacked prince—while in the background, the steady off-and-on hum of a vacuum her mother, who spoke little English, carted room to room, and I thought how the staircase was a small miracle, defying gravity, the kind of miracle Mom wrote to the faith healers about, stuffing money into envelopes, but they never answered.

I remember the darkness of our room at night, orange-checked curtains shuttered tight, the watery blue of the television flickering across my mother’s lined face, lips razor-thin, as she sat at the small table, cigarette in one hand, waiting for my father to return as he did each evening, but never at the time she wanted him to.

I remember the sharp sizzle of a match, the haze of smoke curling from my mother’s mouth like a sigh. The blare of The Waltons on the television and the sudden pause—not more than a fraction of a second—between the end of a scene and the shock of a commercial. The strange thickness of sheets that smelled like the community pool back home where my sister and I used to swim before she got sick and couldn’t play anymore; the shame of outside shoes on carpeting; the way words had folded themselves around my teeth that summer, sticking like gum; and the sharp crack of a sudden storm when I woke at midnight to Dad in his officer’s uniform, gold epaulettes glinting in the light from the muted television, and I sat up in bed—anger tightroped between my parents as they stared at each other—my father’s hand on the door, my mother in tears, and how the sky lit up with a white-hot flash as people on the screen opened and closed their mouths, saying nothing.

Dawn Miller’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, The Forge, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Room Magazine, and elsewhere. Her stories have been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and anthologized in Best Microfictions 2024 and 2025. She lives and writes in Picton, Ontario, Canada where she is working on a collection of short fiction as well as her debut novel.