"Misstep" A short story by Sara Eddy

Misstep

The man left the room to make an important phone call. He stood out in the cold in a blue

pressed shirt and black suit pants. His suit jacket laid abandoned below the hotel bed beside a pair of hot pink pumps.

Milly lay alone in the room, on-top of the bed, and took a deep breath. In through her nose and a long thin stream out through her mouth. She stretched her skinny arms out and traced them against the pillowy white sheets. She felt like a trashy angel, in her red bralette and a leopard print skirt. The cushiony touch of the blankets never got old. They were the one thing she looked forward to with these visits, that and the money. The bed was a nice quick break from the fleece blankets she slept with on her mattress.

She could hear the man’s voice muffled by the plaster wall. He sounded irritated with his voice rising and then falling. The air conditioner turned on and she turned her focus to the steady noise of the air conditioner and decided to scoot off the bed. She languidly wandered the small room, running her fingers through the cool metal grates of the air conditioner, touched the colorful rubber buttons on the television remote, and then shuffled to the bedside table. She slid open the top drawer and saw a book titled, The Holy Bible. She traced her finger against its gold lettering and decided to give it a read with a shrug of her shoulders. It’s been years since she had seen one. She is taken aback to the Sunday’s when she was a child, and her mother carried the Bible in her arms and Milly’s hand in the other, while they walked through the grand, wooden, double doors for worship. Her mother was a good woman.

Milly went to the olive-green sofa that sat between the queen-sized bed and the plaster wall of the bathroom. The cushions were stiff. She opened the book on her lap to a random page in the center. The book’s leather spine dug into her thigh.

Milly was fazed right away by the small, smudged, black text. She let out a puff of agitated breath and shook her head. She read random lines and flipped through some pages. She found an overabundant use of the words: sin, spirit, wrath, Lord, and love.

A sense of agitation and dread ran through her arms and pushed her head against the couch. She didn’t understand how everyday people could turn the fancy sentences into a meaning and basis for how they should live their lives. It was just a bunch of metaphors written maybe a million of years ago. Why does a book like that have so much power?

She brought her head down and rested her chin in her hand and rubbed her barefoot side to side against the itchy fabric of the sofa. Maybe if she kept going to church, she wouldn’t be sitting here on this stiff ass couch. The power of the book, its words, could have kept her from the drugs and steered off all evil spirits. Family could appear, oblivious to their abandonment, and love could find her again, and her life would be normal.

Milly closed the book, lay down with the back of her head against the sofa’s dense arm. She held the book tight against her chest, a hard hug. The armrest pressed discomfortingly against the back of her head. She embraced the pain of a man-made headache as she pressed her skull further into the arm rest; her hands formed into fists.

Milly suddenly sat up, doe eyes going wide when she heard the slam of the hotel door. The man stood before her, back from his urgent phone call. His eyes drifted down to look at Milly with the Bible wrapped in her arms.

“You’re going to need that,” the man said with a joking smirk, and began to unbuckle his belt.