TOUCH THE EVIDENCE

Nothing happened. That is exactly what it wants you to think.

PRESS FOR REASSURANCE

Too late. You are already reading Broken Zine.

I checked into the motel because the conference hotel wanted $389 a night and I am, despite appearances, a woman of principles.

The motel cost $89 and included exactly three amenities: a Bible, an ice bucket, and a lamp that turned on only if you threatened it.

I was exhausted. I put on the robe, which had the texture of a municipal towel, and called room service.

A man answered.

“Kitchen.”

That was the whole greeting.

I said, “Do you have a club sandwich?”

He said, “Technically.”

I should have hung up.

Instead I asked what “technically” meant.

“We have bread. We have turkey. We have ambition.”

Reader, that did something to me.

I ordered it.

Twenty minutes later there was a knock. A young man stood outside holding a tray with a sandwich leaning at a forty-five-degree angle and four tiny glass bottles of ketchup arranged like evidence.

“Club sandwich,” he said.

“Technically?” I asked.

“Emotionally.”

I tipped him too much.

This happened again the next night.

I ordered fries I did not need.

Then pie.

Then coffee at 10:40 p.m. just because I wanted to hear him say “Kitchen.”

By the third night I had learned his name was Milo, he hated the conference crowd, and the motel’s “chef” was a microwave with seniority.

Nothing happened.

That is important.

But there are kinds of intimacy that are worse than sex.

He brought me an extra pickle without being asked.

He remembered I took coffee black.

He quietly replaced the tiny ketchup bottles with six because, as he put it, “You seem like you’re going through something.”

I was.

I was attending a conference called Building Resilience Through Strategic Alignment.

On my last night I called the kitchen.

No answer.

I called again.

A woman picked up.

“Kitchen.”

“Is Milo there?”

Pause.

“Milo quit.”

I sat on the edge of the bed in my municipal robe holding a tiny ketchup bottle.

At checkout, I asked the front desk clerk if she knew where he went.

She said, “Probably somewhere with benefits.”

I hope so.

I stole the ketchup bottle.

It is on my desk.

Sometimes the heart needs a souvenir no larger than two ounces.

Lulu Vex keeps the confession drawer, where desire, bad judgment, office supplies, motel carpeting, and other dangerous household objects are allowed to testify.

Push something. The magazine is poorly supervised.

PUSH THE WEIRD BUTTON

A small bureaucrat somewhere just stamped APPROVED FOR NONSENSE.