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into the nearest alley
way. At six hours to this Alto’s noon the two reach the saloon of
an out of the way hotel. Entering the lobby just as a fat charcoal
suited balding business man inhales something squidish thing from a
large soup cauldron between his knees. Breathing heaving grunts
with each chomp of his slurping shark mouth. A Slender blonde sits
opposite the feasting fat man, looking meagerly fed. Starved for a
father's love as a youth, who then starves herself for the idyll
affections of hideous strangers with money.
    “ We need to rest,” Cider
says to the stork faced lobby girl standing behind a cedar desk,
before a wall of door keys, and beneath a black hat that slightly
too big for her small head.
    “ Some rest will be some
money,” squawks the clerk with bended neck, squinting to
Anna.
    “ Is this place
open?”
    “ Yeah hun, the
money.”
    “ How much?” Anna
asks.
    “ Don't worry about it, I
got a thing.”
    “ For two rooms.”
    “ We have only one left,”
the clerk says.
    “ With two beds?” Anna asks.
Cider digs through his pockets for a wallet, then his wallet for a
stack of cards, then the cards for a blue one or a green
one.
    “ Here ya go,” he says
handing her a green one.
    “ No.”
    “ Okay, this
one.”
    “ It's a different name
sir.”
    “ So, charge an extra
hundred or who cares.”
    Cla cling! the register pops and
chings closed.
    “ Third floor, somewhere,”
the clerk drones pointing away, just away.
    “ Thank you,” Anna
says.
    “ Go away sir,” the clerk
says sternly, then smirks and lets out a daffy laugh. The two walk
across the lobby's wooden floor, a room resembling a large bar. The
fat man is splashing his meal onto the starving blonde sitting next
to him. The call button dings and lights up as Anna yawns toward
her reflection in the polished and scratched brass elevator doors.
Their room is at the end of a hall with red and gray checkered
floor tiles and agitating blue lights highlighting scuffed beige
paint and water stained walls
    “ This is it,” he says,
putting the key into its hole and jiggling it without
result.
    “ Number nine-three,” she
says. The door opens to a dingy feeling room with teal paint
peeling off the ceiling. Sparsely furnished by only a mirrored
dresser, and a table, and rocking chair at an open window as
furniture. Wrought with the smell of mildew and a feel of
melancholy that they'd have to accept to be ever comfortable in.
She collapses fully clothed on the bed, and rolls herself in its
sheets. Not even getting the sneakers off her throbbing tired feet
before she falls fast asleep a minute before sunrise with the moon
standing bright in the sky.
    Anna yawns awake in the comfort of an
empty room and an empty bed, sliding her sneakers off her
feet.
    “ Did we?” she asks, though
is answered only by the ceiling fan creaking and lazily the wafting
the air, sounding like the ticking of an uneven clock.
    “ How will I get home?” she
whispers her first wakeful thought. Then again reliving how she got
to be in the bed she’s been laying alone in for the last few hours.
Bathed in sunlight ebbing through the dancing dust that fills the
room. A smoke yellowed curtain wavers in the window she's been
sitting at from sun up to sundown for the last several days.
Prowling her view for the pedestrians passing in their daily
habits, finding it much different from her standard. Thinking of it
as a quiet river town, though having not left the room since she's
been here. Knowing nothing of anything but what she can see through
her caged bird’s eye view from a fourth story window. When asked about the wanted picture in the papers
he told her he’s wanted for the minor violation of unlawful
InterAlto transit, akin to hopping a turnstile, and that she is
wanted as well. Telling her that to leave one's own Alto when it
and she is supposed to have been washed out is a crime to nature,
and the laws are after her for it. Unable to mount an