The Concierge of Lost Causes
He sits behind a laminate counter that's seen more cigarette burns than a dive bar floor, staring at a wall of cubby holes that hold everything but mail. This is the man who manages the Lost and Found, though he'll tell you straight up that nothing ever gets found--it just gets abandoned.
His eyes are heavy, bagged with the weight of a thousand sleepless nights and the kind of exhaustion that a pot of burnt Maxwell House can't fix. He looks like he was patterned after the lobby furniture, faced, slight strained, and built in 1974.
His "lost and found" isn't full of umbrellas or phone chargers. It's a collection of the strange such as ...
... The Jar of Appalachian Dirt left in Room 10 by a man who claimed he was being followed by his own shadow. ... A stopped gold pocket watch that hasn't ticked since 1962, left on a pillow that said, "it's finally over." ... The Unmarked Key: Not to a room at the Hells Bells, but something else entirely found in the drain of the communal shower along with the smell of ozone. ... A matchbook from a diner in a town that burned down in 1890: the matches are still dry, and the strike strip smells like old grief. ... A deck of cards with two Queen of Spades left by a traveler who looked like he'd been running since the Truman administration. ... A small velvet box containing a human whisper, and when the concierge cracked it open to catalog it, he heard his own mother's voice calling him for dinner, though she's been in the ground for 30 years. He taped it shut and moved it to the bottom of the bin.
The concierge keeps a bin for the oddities and writes it all down in that leather-bound ledger with the same bored expression he uses to give directions to the nearest gas station. To him, the bizarre is just another Tuesday at the Hells Bells Motel that time forgot.
