By Mark Rosenblum

The stranger exhaled his last drag and rose from the sagging bed. He pulled on jeans, dragged a sun-bleached polo over a pale chest and left the motel room. She was alone now. The only sound at 3 a.m. was the hum of the ice machine in the hallway. The periodic thump of cubes colliding in their cage of frost. A brief impact, a fracture, and then shards into vapor. 

In the room, moonlight cut through bent, dusty blinds. On the nightstand sat her purse. She rummaged past the stranger’s crumpled bills until her hand found the knife. The blade caught the light. She pressed its tip to the inside of her arm, drawing another scarlet line across pale skin–a map of routes leading nowhere. 

Strangers touch her without caring and look at her without seeing. Only the knife leaves a mark. And with that mark, she exists–for a moment.

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Mark Rosenblum is a New York native who now lives in Southern California where he misses the taste of real pizza and good deli food. He attempts not to drive his wife crazy, but tends to fail miserably. His eclectic ramblings of fiction and poetry appear in Gemini Magazine, Gold Man Review, Monkeybicycle, Penduline, Vine Leaves, the Raleigh Review, and other journals in print and online.