When God books a room at Bob’s Holiday Hotel, the desk clerk never glances up from his tiny TV set. God loves a good pseudonym. He picks Mike D’Angelo, manifests a vanity plate on a white Ford truck. He glides barefoot over the lobby carpet of deep blue and coffee stains. (This place has that locker-room-damp, no matter how you towel dry, your shorts still cling between your thighs.) Before God unlocks his door, he knows. He tugs open dust-lined drapes. In the pool, swans float among foam cups and cigarette butts. Finches and mockingbirds are flocking. The maple tree is full of crows. God motions them away and sighs. He loads the bases in the seventh. The clerk never sees the room key drop back in the proper slot, the pickup vanish from the lot. He is busy praying for Verlander to throw just one more out.
Janeen Pergrin Rastall lives in Gordon, MI (population: 2). She is the author of In the Yellowed House (dancing girl press, 2014) and Objects May Appear Closer (Celery City Chapbooks, 2015), and she’s a co-author of Heart Radicals (ELJ Publications, 2016). Her website is janeenpergrinrastall.wordpress.com.