3483 words

You know this elevator well.

You’re leaving the room that was never really your room, another transient visitor in a transient space, but something nips at the back of your neck as you wait for the cables to pull the elevator car up to your floor. What did you forget? Blue and grey and beige carpet squares point endless forking paths towards doors sheltering lost things and lost people, but you’re not among them anymore.

Last night’s haven has spat you out despite its warm welcome. What did you leave behind and can you live without it?

If you go back to that room, you’ll miss your flight. There are no other flights. You desperately want to go home, even if you don’t know what it is that makes that place your home.

#

Time ticks by, options dwindling as the floor numbers crawl toward yours. Just enough time to go back becomes Can I go a few days without my inhaler? You can’t move your feet, so you decide I can get a new toothbrush. The lights of the elevator’s display distort, each previous number transferring in a blurry honey drip. You should have time to go back, but I’m the whisper in your ear. If something happens…They have oxygen on airplanes, don’t they? Do you remember how the door to your room sticks? How the key card kept disappearing from your hand?

In your room, in your home, in the place that anchors your sleeping form, a trench of sweat darkens your pillow. Your lips stick to the cotton, mouth leeched dry in service to the cold, viscous pool that won’t quite absorb into the fabric. A product of your body, something that is supposed to say inside its soft casing, now joining the stray hairs and tiny flakes of skin you molted in this laborious hibernation. Your breath is a soft and rhythmic huff, the night tide lapping at dry sand. I could watch you until dawn, but I am here to work, and I can’t work with you on your stomach.

I gently turn you over and slide a finger into your waiting mouth, that perfect O already formed for me, your body and subconscious as aligned as an infant rooting for sustenance. Not a beat skipped, not a floor number missed in the place where your mind resides. Your cheeks suction to my slender shape, your tongue a soft, fat curve suckling my molten flesh.

A man walks by you in front of the elevator bay, close enough that you can taste his hot breath. The low, round spread of cumin and garlic, a citric sweet heat that makes you think of aleppo peppers. But there is no scent to verify what you taste. You know this man, someone you worked with three years ago, as bland as the spreadsheets and TGIF memes he used to shuffle into your inbox. He held you in his lap and caressed your feet once, in another dream you can’t shake.

Just like after that dream, you will wake up with your underwear wet and a sharp allium odor thickening the cloistered air of your bedroom. Your lips will be hot and splitting, your jaw aching, your tongue still cupping a phantom shape. You will jab your own finger into your mouth and gently scrape a thick, white curd from your tongue. The phantoms of cumin, garlic, aleppo merged into the unidentifiable paste of morning-breath souring your mouth.

That’s when I’ll know I’ve done my job. Your confusion—that brief but heavy-bottomed fear slinking through your gut—fills my lungs. The desperation that drags my body through every evening drains from me and is replaced by a pleasant fullness against my ribs. Though temporary, it’s enough to lull me into a sleep as deep as yours.

But not yet. The elevator still has not arrived.

#

I envy you.

I once loved what I do, but now I’m so tired. While your body rests, your mind voyages endless beige hallways and brass-trimmed elevators, tasteful grey and white rooms, windows that reveal views of dumpster-lined city alleys or pastel-blurred mountain vistas, depending on what you watched on TV that night. While your mind plays and your body recharges, I do not rest. I am the projectionist, feeding you this escape, succor after endless bills and meetings and chasing time that has been earmarked for everyone but yourself. Isn’t this—deep, dreaming sleep—paradise? In return, I struggle for every lungful of your slumbering breath, for every mouthful of anxious sweat, you never once acknowledging our symbiosis.

You’re on your back tonight, so I’m sitting on your chest, perched over your supine form like the Fuseli painting that’s made a cruel mockery of me for hundreds of years. How dare he portray me as an image of his own torment and deprivation? A grotesque beast shrouded in shame and shadow, an incubus defiling innocent necessity. Fuseli knew nothing of my purpose, the sacrifices I make for that precious human slumber. His blame was misdirected, distorting my image as some sort of short-sighted revenge. It was his own mind that cursed him with years of nightmares, not me.

It isn’t just him. All of you made me this creature, misinterpreted my gifts and distorted them into a curse. I settle in and do my work, fueled by the human hate that burns so chemical bright in millions of chests across this world as each of you recount the immobility, the confusion, the fear that leaves you hollow the next morning. Would you rather have the black void, that sister of death, hours sliced from your mind and lost in the stillness of your bed? Maybe so, because, like you, I find myself longing for the silent nothing of sleep more and more with every passing night. What’s the point of another room, another bed, when you no longer love the one thing you were born to do?

In the hotel lobby—tonight the walls are dark and rumbling towards you, the only light a creeping mist beneath the desk, the lounge chairs, your feet—you clutch the handle of your wheeled suitcase, but your other hand is empty despite the phantom weight that tugs at your shoulder. The digital numbers above the elevator’s doors move with their usual slow purpose, but this time you can’t make them out; they are still recognizable, but meaningless in this setting.

What did you forget this time? You pat your various pockets, confirming the familiar round-cornered rectangles of your phone and wallet. An image flits by, much quicker than those slowly climbing elevator numbers: an open suitcase (huge and aluminum, bound in raised silver stripes, a relic from the back of your father’s closet) like a mouth sloppy and starving for the clothes strewn about the unmade hotel bed.

Is there time to go back? Can you live without those things?

On your back, you groan into the frigid atmosphere of your bedroom. Home greets you with nothing more than dry air that scrapes your throat and leaves your voice raw come morning.

I unhinge my jaw and seal my lips over your nose and mouth, tilting your head upward so that it hovers just a hair above the pillow. My tongue laps at the vulnerable passage of your throat as I pull your chin fully into my mouth. Your sweat is silky and salty at once, and I find my tongue lingering in the creases of your neck, drawing out ume plum saline from a part of you that does not offer what I need. I used to take my time with this part, this extraneous pleasure, a creature dying of thirst with the clean mountain spring at her back. You, though… You are my nectar. One of life’s small pleasures. I have to remind myself of that all the time now.

You are preoccupied by that mysterious necessity you left behind, so I allow myself to linger here, on your chest. I suck your head all the way into my mouth, a reverse birth, a homecoming. The curve of your crown against my soft pallet, your lips catching on the papillae of my tongue, your hair lacing my fangs. My molars indent a necklace on flesh that never feels sunlight. I inhale the sweat of a racing mind, your little room thick with the fog of animal fat and scalp musk.

You don’t resist. You never resist.

7

     9

          31

               P6

A green light encircles each number, each symbol out of sequence. Our eyes follow along and our chests lift in unison.

Just like you, I’m waiting for the elevator doors to open.

#

You slide out of my mouth like a placenta-shrouded pupa. Your heels buck against the back of my teeth, then up and over, your knees a brief obstacle, your belly a slick lozenge of suet congealing on my tongue. For just a moment, your fingers catch in the pockets of my gums as if you don’t want to leave this place, this state. The elevator numbers are moving too fast now—

17 18 23 353637

—so you jam your thumb into that circular button, the green ring of light promising the coming benediction. The loud whir and grind of metal slicing through a column of steel and wood and plaster and flesh, but that ding of recognition never comes. Did it skip your floor? Again? Panic tightens your slumbering brow as your fingers go numb and your thumb struggles to make contact with the button again. Your body—in my mouth, in your room, in your home—stiffens. As I release the last of you, my tongue prods the crevices of your lips, dry skin yielding to whispers of cumin and citrus.

Right back into the cradle of your bed, your mattress eager to caress more than your phantom shape. Despite the evidence of my saliva dried to a sour-smelling sheen on your skin, you have no idea you’ve been anywhere else.

If tomorrow was any other morning, you would wake with the vague memory of white walls and bland carpet squares and scuff marks on all that tasteful dark wood furniture. Thick metal doors unclasping like canine jaws snapping air. But tomorrow will be different, same as tonight is different. I’ve taken you all the way into me, but you have yet to see the inside of that elevator.

#

Everything changes, once I’ve taken you into me, once I unlock this thing in you. It’s a blunt cut, a sloppy splice in the film reel of your dream. Your sleeping consciousness no longer registers you as watching lit numbers and shapes slowly drip out of reach, waiting, fretting over your journey home. In a framework of fading colors and distorted shapes, you are birthed fully-formed and exiting the elevator, walking towards the surrogate space you’ll make your own for this temporary stretch of time; you didn’t exist before those elevator doors parted. The bag you forgot to pack is in your hand. Nothing was forgotten because you carry with you all that is.

Finally.

Corridors twist. The scattered chairs marking each bank of rooms repose naked and untouched. You’d be lost, but it’s all the same, isn’t it? This is the recurring part, the touchstone in every night of static. The key card slips in and out of your hand. Your mind struggles to order the numbers on the door. But none of this matters. You know any and all of these rooms are for you.

If you were to wake up tomorrow morning, you would be left with nothing more than the vague ache of unnamable dismay. If you have someone kind enough to ask how you slept, you would scour your brain for the details of this dream, but stop short. The lead dropping in your stomach tells you that you don’t want to remember.

But that’s an old feeling. From all the way back to family vacations and your earliest inkling of not being entirely alone in the dark, to just last night when your fingers were fat and sweat kept unseating your grip on the door handle. The hot panic that used to tickle your bladder has turned to a burning, hollow hunger in the center of your chest. Tonight is defined entirely by need and purpose, ensuring dry palms and doors that acquiesce to your control. You slip inside the dark hotel room, but it’s only after you oh-so-gently close the door behind you that you realize the bag is no longer in your hand.

Remember, you have all that you need now.

You approach the form on the bed. She’s on her back, dark hair fanned across the two pillows propping up her head. The stark white sheet and comforter are pulled up past her chin so that the trimmed edge catches on her bottom lip. You can’t quite make out her face even as an abrupt huff turns her head and slips the sheet from her open mouth. It’s silly how you used to fear this body, this entity, this familiar yet eternal creature in fitful repose. She is no different from any other person in any other bed on any other night. You see that now. She’s no different than you were.

You climb upon her chest, clumsily (we were all new once, even in the things we’re born to do), knees sinking into her stomach, palms bracing on the sheets just in time to prevent your full collapse. She stirs, groans, eyes racing under fluttering lids. You freeze. Are you doing this right? Instinct quells any response.

Once she settles, you unhinge your jaw. There are no mirrors here, but you see now that you were wrong. That Fuseli was wrong. Your fear—your prior refusal to recognize our purpose, our function, how we serve—assigns grotesqueness to what is unknown. Even without your reflection as proof, you feel what you are. As you pull her chin, her nose, all that long dark hair into your mouth—an instinct tiger-quick and untouched by doubt—you know your power. Your beauty.

You’re an animal seeking heat. You’re a god hand-feeding nectar into millions of waiting, eager mouths. You are the projectionist.

How could you ever get tired of this? How could this ever become a burden? You’ve never been hungrier. You’ve never looked upon another creature and realized there is nothing you envy, nothing more you desire.

This sleeping person is the hungry mouth, the pupa cocooning in your gut, and, in return, the supplicant feeding thin rivers of bargain and prayer into your eager veins. Deprivation transfigures a simple cleansing act into veneration—you remember that ecstasy. For now there are no fangs, no horns, no ogre snout because that image doesn’t exist in the corridors of her sleeping mind.

She doesn’t know, will never know, because, finally—

The elevator doors slide open and she steps into the darkness.

© 2026 J.A.W. McCarthy