prompt: build, title: the name game in misc. flash fiction

“Jeannie’s Dream Motel” hadn’t always been called that. Who knew how long it’d been there, on a lonely country road through farmlands between Richfield Springs and West Winfield, but she’d no doubt there’d been a dozen other names before. A different sign on the shingle for every awful field-stench you’re subjected to while driving past. She imagined that someone probably decided to build it in the 40s during the post-war automobile boom before the birth of the Thruway, when you needed to hit each and every stoplight on state route Twenty to drive from Albany to Buffalo in just about sixteen hours. Whatever it was called then, it was probably a relatively nice place at first, clean beds for Midwestern families looking to save a little cash on road trips to The Hall of Fame by not sleeping in overpriced tourist-gouging Cooperstown Proper. It’d been eight decades of declines since and, if the dreams that once lived there are not yet quite dead, they are certainly hobbling around with a helluva limp. She often wondered if there’d ever been a “Jeannie” at all.

Her name wasn’t Jeannie, her name was Angela, though her lover called her “Angie”, something her husband hadn’t called her in years. It was always strictly Angela. She called the lover “Bob”, even though his name was Robert and his wife mostly just called him “Douche-Bag” unless they were in an embarrassing public space. People change, of course, as do the names they are called, just like buildings or roads or crappy motels where people sign in under assumed names, for sex.

Bob’s wife hadn’t been interested in sex since the hysterectomy that saved her life, he was glad she wasn’t dead, he was a philanderer, not a monster, but without any physical connection their relationship had dwindled away to a business partnership. Angie’s husband, well, she’d known he was probably gay before they married, but the priest told her that the love of a good woman would change it? Either God was wrong or she just wasn’t good enough. She wondered which.

It was not to keep secrets from spouses that they both drove thirty miles through the country in separate cars, so that they could have sex in a cheap motel across the road from a bait shop that probably also sold crystal methamphetamine from under the counter. It was for appearances, in their communities, for their kids and jobs, that they signed the guestbooks as Mr. and Ms. Fake.

It probably wasn’t love and probably would never be love, but they weren’t fooling themselves any more than they were fooling the night manager with the missing teeth and the Confederate tattoos. It was about feeling wanted. It was about knowing another person’s touch. About being less alone for the hours of nine to sunup every few weeks. And anyway what is in a name? You can call that farm stink “fertilizer” or call it “cow shit”. Either way, it smells just as God Awful.