When I wake, it’s breakfast, everybody acting like nothing ever happened. “Want toast?” But I see the screen door torn open down its center like lightning permanently let in. Some kids have little brothers or sisters that live with them. I have a li’l lightning bolt I invited in this house forever. I brought the world home. All of us must now live so unzipped into drying public sunlight.

I know I saw what I did not understand but will, ahead. I’ve saved each second, every shift of it. I know I slowed it once. But now things feel way worse. Thanks to me, things have only broken open even more. I guess from my parents’ faces that what I stopped one time, it has not ended.

And when, passing butter, she looks disgusted right my way, when he stares tender, checking how things are with me, I receive a four-ton load of all I am too young to know yet.

I see that I have ended them.

In trying to save my Dad from Mom, I have already killed them both.

II. Exodus “Our Motel Bible Route”

And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac…. And I have … established my covenant … to give them … Canaan, the land of their pilgrimage, wherein they were strangers…. And I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God…. And I will bring you in unto the land.

Exodus 6:3–8

Owners of second-rank motels need time-consuming hobbies. Your last customer’s car leaves. You go in and change the nasty sheets. Nothing else will happen this whole afternoon. So far into countryside, everything is lazy but the flies. If you’ve ever felt one itch toward suicide, hot hours in a cinder-block lobby will clambake all such urges to your surface.

Why not take up jigsaw puzzles? Learning to make mosaic coasters might be nice. “VACANCY”? Well, accept Jesus as your personal Saviour. Then, especially at your time of worst despair around 3:16 p.m., reread your Bible. John 3:16. Unique ideas and handicrafts do help time pass. Start such projects. Pronto.

My father, a believer and a cuckold, belonged to the club that places Bibles in transients’ rooms worldwide. Sundays, Dad delivered. And so, so did I. As his only kid and son, as someone Mother preferred not to see during leisure afternoons spent with mysterious headaches that kept her sick in the bed each Sabbath, I became Dad’s “Bible Special’s B-52 copilot.”