Monday Morning Required Reading. Josephine Rowe has a keen sense of desperation, of the hope that endless motion will somehow change things. I can feel the edge of depression, the frantic mental clawing for something which dissolves into complete nothingness as I read this story. In my experience, that's a hard thing to capture. There's a certain mentality to this particular brand of entrapment that is difficult to convey without demeaning the one who is experiencing it, or belittling the sensation. Let me know if you agree with me. Here's Rowe's "Hotels":

They live in hotels for awhile, after he does that to her face. Not real bad, but bad enough for them to leave the same night. Frantically packing the car as though hoping to outrun some unknowable natural disaster. There's sand in the bed, Baby, he's saying. Back at the house, a million years ago in the suburbs. And she won't tell him why. She's letting him believe things. There's sand in the bed, and they are a long way from the ocean.

He tucks a blanket around her shoulders and they drive for three hours, past the bedroom communities in the west, his hand on her thigh and the radio on. When he speaks it's as though he is speaking to a child he hopes to befriend, and she answers as a child might, imagining her child-self running down the dark stretch of highway alongside the passenger window of their white Hyundai... [KEEP READING]