Room 102

When she was dying they took her with them to the coast to a literary hotel and she checked into the Hemingway room. She would rather have been in the Woolf Room or the Nin room but even the dying take what they can get.

There were unusual horns above the bed and a zebra-striped brown and white bedspread, but when they went down to dinner they ate like Parisians with money: roasted duck, champagne, etc., although by this time she couldn't eat very much.

An obscure poet had lived in the Hemingway Room before it was a literary hotel, when it was room 102 of a rundown building in a poor beach town. He hung his long coat over the windows, blocking the sun and the beach and the waves so he could write. The waves that we, these few years later, pay for. The ones she didn't notice.

She hadn't known him, but was grateful for the soft bed and a room that didn't look like any she had been in before, that in fact looked brand new.