Room 13: The Motel That Listens
Rain hammered the highway as I pulled into the neon mouth of a motel that looked as if it had absorbed every late-night confession in town. The sign flickered between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m., a cadence that kept time with my own uneasy heartbeat. The desk lamp hummed like a tired moth, and the clerk's smile didn't quite reach his eyes.
The key scraped a chorus of tiny metallic notes as I opened Room 13. The door sighed, the air inside smelled of damp carpet and something older—memory, perhaps, pressed between the sheets. The room wore its age with a quiet pride, wallpaper curling at the corners, a bed that sighed when I sat, and a clock that seemed to count differently when no one listened.
As I pulled the curtains, a whisper began—thin as cigarette smoke and twice as cold. It turned into fragments of voices, not angry, only curious, listening for the moment I would break.
- The mirror shows a version of you that speaks back, as if the glass remembers more than you do.
- A radio that never quite tunes to a station, yet somehow always transmits your own secrets back at you.
- Footprints on the carpet that rearrange themselves when you blink—the path to the door leading nowhere but here.
- A clock that slows to a crawl, then hopping backward just long enough to remind you of yesterday's mistakes.
- A phone that rings with your own voice, asking the same question you tried to forget.
In the shallow glow, condensation gathered on the window and wrote a message that wasn't a message at all, but a confession etched in breath: you are listening, but we remember.
We listen so you won't forget us, and if the night asks you to stay, tell it no—and listen anyway.
When the dawn light finally threaded through the blinds, I left Room 13 with something heavier than fear: the sense that the motel had learned my shape, that it had learned my language, that it would keep listening long after I was gone. The neon sign flickered in agreement as I stepped into the morning, a quiet vow stitched into the rain—some rooms don’t end; they keep listening, and Room 13 is listening still.