I'm at this hotel in Pennsylvania I don't even know the name of. Country something. Inn whatever.

That hallway on the ground floor between the back parking lot and the front desk. There's the pool behind a row of windows, the sheen of its warm surface unperturbed. The adjacent hot tub is empty and ringed with yellow keep-out tape.

The ice machine makes an awful clatter. Who stays in the room next door?

It was cold when we pulled in. The side road it's on extends to nowhere: a dim and windswept landscape that rises in the distance. There's a stack of bright red, horizontal bars halfway up, like a house made out of light.