236 miles out from Minneapolis. 2:27 in the morning. A ten-foot-wide hallway with glass walls stretching over a semi-residential road that connects the east and west hotel buildings. A sign attached to the ceiling that announces the separation between the two. The cough of a struggling central air conditioning waking up — it does this for fifteen minutes every hour. At its tallest point, the building has four floors, one being a giant atrium. Mostly there are six floors. Many of the interior lights stay on, even this late at night. The hallways are empty and the continental breakfast area is closed. Just outside of the retractable chain barrier, an electric kettle with self-serve drink packets. A small puddle of coffee on the faux-marble drips onto the cream tile and down a drain by the sink. Maintenance doors remain locked when no one is using them. The ice machine has its own little room. The filter needs replacing, and the blinking outlines the blunt of the room. A sink. A bucket. A counter. And in the reflection of the window, a face that is tired and unshaven. The left half of its hair is disheveled from sleeping on an uncomfortable bed. The body is wearing a flannel and jeans, with an American Greetings card featuring a rainstorm folded in the left pocket. The carpet on the floor is beige, floral, and sparse with dark stains blotching areas. There are two elevator doors at the end of the hallway. The sign above them places both of them on the first floor. An atrium with low-hanging orb lights and soft jazz music. Couches that curve and tables made of real wood. There’s darkness in the corners of the lobby when the sun is down. The plastic plants hide in it. Sliding doors that jerk open at the slightest sign of life to let in the warm, damp air. A half-filled parking lot of cars forming a maze between the road and the west side ward. Beside the lot, a foggy-glass bus stop with a single, backless bench, where a man is sleeping, covering himself in a Big 12 college football tie blanket and using his backpack like a pillow. A tear-down notice citing the closure of the public transit system is taped to a panel. An advertisement on it for a local high school band’s new extended play album. On the street, a roundabout with yellow snapdragons and petunias. Crickets and frogs drone from some unseen wooded area at the bottom of a void-like hill. To the north, a small apartment complex with a central staircase cordoned off by a touch-keypad. Two all-terrain bicycles chained to the unused handicap parking spots. Ten units total, each facing the staircase split by two levels, some with doormats and some without. One window on the second floor is lit so brightly that it looks like a doorway into a kitchen or a projection on a screen. On the white smart fridge, someone has hung up their child’s art projects. The other side of the building faces a strip mall with seven local businesses, all closed for the night. The mall is L-shaped, and there are only two cars in the parking lot. The storefront signs stay on, advertising to no one. The trash cans are overflowing with wrappers from the candy store and boxes from the pizza place. Near the one by the chiropractor, there’s a dropped ice cream cup on the sidewalk, vanilla is spilling out onto the blacktop, rotting and waiting for rain to wash it away. The sky is dark and purple, and the moon is only halfway formed. What time is it? How long have I been here? I could imagine her waking up and wondering where I’d gone. Maybe that would be too much for her right now. Where are we? Where are we really going? It is so easy to float so far away when the sky is so high up and everything is so small. I can barely see the lights of the hotel over the mall and the complex. Now there’s thunder in the distance, just beyond the blinking warning lights of the wind-farm on the plains, maybe twenty miles out. I’ve heard that even one blade can be 100 feet long, but they just look like little dust specs on a quilt. It’s hard to discern what things are from so far away, and those red lights don't seem to be coming any closer.
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Macy has signed petitions trying to bring the city bus routes back.