Mama doesn’t mind ghosts, she’s a little nuts anyway. She is seventy-two years old and a self-proclaimed “collector”, which means she hasn’t thrown anything away in thirty years. Shit, longer than that. She has an eighteen-room motel, and none of the rooms were usable until DamNear got here: all of them were packed to the eyes with junk. She’s got everything from dartboards to headboards to board games to sweatshirts with embroidered cats on them. Mama is a big-time dial-up shopper, shut-in like she is; you name it, she’s bought it on QVC and it is probably still in the original packaging.

DamNear’s favorite thing that she found at Mama’s motel is the jar of doll heads. Nobody knows where that thing came from, least of all Mama.

The fact is, Mama is losing her edge, and DamNear does a lot of the work that needs to be done around the motel: repairs, cleaning, like that. The other girl that lives here spends most of her time keeping Mama company. The other girl, Ginger, doesn’t believe in ghosts; Mama, on the other hand, talks to them when nobody else is around.

DamNear is scared shitless of ghosts. She hasn’t seen them yet, but she knows they’re there. She wouldn’t be living in this shithole if Mama hadn’t hired her as caretaker. When she rolled into town two years ago, hunkered under a blanket in the back of a pickup truck, you could say she was pretty flat broke. The town had seemed a little more promising then: it wasn’t much, but it could be worse. She should have figured out a thing or two, looking at the signs on the businesses. There was an “AUTO SHOP PARTS & SERVICE,” a “Miners Club MEMBER’S ONLY,” a “Sammy’s Country Club Restaurant Bar Casino,” and a “Sammy’s Motel.” And that was it. Main Street USA.

That first night, seeing as she had no money, DamNear decided to check out this Sammy character and try to negotiate some kind of room rate.

Four hours later, after getting kicked out of the kitchen with fifty cents and a “don’t come back you speak to my daughter like that,” DamNear realized it wasn’t likely she’d get a room at Sammy’s Motel. Probably, ever. In fact, all she’d discovered from her efforts was that (a) Sammy had a daughter that was ripe for plucking; (b) Sammy’s daughter didn’t want to get plucked; (c) Sammy owned everything in town – from the motel, to the restaurant, to the trailer park, to thousands of acres of ranch surrounding the area; and (d) Sammy didn’t like her one bit.

DamNear went next door to the Miner’s Club to find out what her fifty cents could buy her. They wouldn’t even let her in the door. It was dark by then, late September and the wind was blustering and she was starting to get cold –

Late September! DamNear thinks. That means it’s been two years since she got here, like, any day now. Two fucking years in this shithole town? Now that’s just wrong.

DamNear is sitting on her bed in her room by now, with her glass pipe and her bottle of Jim Beam and some comics, all wrapped in her blankets and engrossed in her thoughts. She takes a hit and puts the pipe aside, then sinks back onto the bed with her arms folded behind her head.

It’s time for her to get out of here. She really doesn’t belong in this shitty town. The locals here either hate her for being a black lesbian punk with a big mouth, or they love her because she runs speed, but it’s not like she has any friends. She’s afraid to leave (or come back to) her motel room after sunset, because the hallways at Mama’s are dark and full of junk and ghosts. She has no CDs, no money to buy CDs, and all the radio stations out here are country or Mexican. What the fuck is she even doing here in the first place?



It was good, for a while. Really, it was.

The first night, however, was scary and bitterly cold. DamNear found herself on the street – not for the first time in her life, but definitely the first time in a town with no sidewalk – with no chance of finding shelter. She was walking along in front of the buildings when she noticed curls of blue-white steam, glowing in the moonlight, at knee-level. They appeared to be coming from the ground in front of a big, dilapidated wooden building. She smelled sulfur and cat piss (the latter, it would later become apparent, was coming from the house; the former, of course, came from beneath the ground). She walked closer.

There in front of what she would later discover to be Mama’s defunct motel, DamNear discovered a little puddle bubbling up from the ground. It smelled like sulphur, and it smelled hot. She stuck her finger in it, and right away pulled it back out! Shit that was hot! And that was when she decided to sleep right there in the front yard of this weird house. She didn’t really have a choice, it was the only place around that was any kind of warm, and she would get up at sunrise and leave before anyone knew she’d been there.

So DamNear pulled out her sleeping bag and huddled up there, curled around the hot puddle with her backpack for a pillow and for a while she let the headlights from the highway lull her to sleep, and later she thought she heard a woman singing a sad song and she felt soft arms raise her up and rock her like a baby, poor little baby so far from home.

The next morning, DamNear woke up in the back yard. Shit you not, it’s true. She woke up in the back yard and she was being poked with a broom, the bristles cutting into her cheek and neck and her first reaction was to grab the broom with one strong forearm and swing it away from whoever was holding it and CRACK! it hit an olive tree and the handle broke.

“Well that wasn’t a nice thing to do,” said Mama in a raspy old voice. She was standing still at the top of the back stoop, and her voice sounded calm but her callused hands were clutching her skirt tight. Mama couldn’t see much, and she’d thought the black shape in the yard was some kind of dead animal. It sure smelled enough like one. The Molitars (for that was the name of the ghost family who shared Mama’s house) had been up late last night, so Mama knew there was some sort of disturbance. To be perfectly honest, she was glad it wasn’t a dead animal, because it would be all kinds of trouble to have it carted away. But what, exactly, was it? With strength like that, it must be human. Mama hoped it was a human of the alive type and not the dead type. She decided to ask.

“Who are you?”

“Fuck,” DamNear groaned.

Mama shut her mouth even tighter, her thin lips folding almost over themselves. Her knuckles were turning white where her hands clasped her skirts. Please, please, not another angry ghost! She had enough trouble with Bill and his tantrums.

Then the black shape turned, rustling as it did, and Mama heard a zipper. A new wave of stink came off the shape – but it was an alive stink, the smell of someone who hadn’t washed in a long while.

DamNear had just unzipped her sleeping bag and was rubbing her swollen eyes. She was very, very thirsty and her lids were swollen almost closed, but she knew something was wrong. Aside, of course, from the ol’ lady poking her with a broom. She was somewhere different.

She decided to ask.

“Where am I?”




Anyway, long story short, that’s how DamNear got to Mama’s house, and later on over a tall glass of water Mama told her all about the ghosts of the Molitar family and DamNear ended up moving in to that haunted motel in the middle of the desert and setting up a little speed-running business out of a dark and creepy little room. She didn’t see the ghosts ever with her own eyes, but Mama said the ladies must have brought DamNear to the back yard to keep her safe.

DamNear kind of found that heartwarming.






Sarah was just an episode, really, in DamNear’s crazy life. Her life is full of episodes, and most of those episodes have to do with some girl or another. She’s always been into sex, ever since she was a little girl and she used to let the neighbor boys feel her titties. She lost her virginity at thirteen and started going with girls at fourteen: Mini, everyone called her, that blond girl with the limp bangs and bags under her eyes, she and DamNear used to go to the bathrooms at the public pool and smoke cigarettes and make out. DamNear was hot shit back then, because she was little and she had this high scratchy voice and she was badass and she would do anything. She’s still little, short of stature anyway, but her tits got big and her ass did too. Her voice is still scratchy and she’ll still do anything, but it’s not the same when you don’t have a tight little package to work with.

DamNear is thinking about the first time Mini made her come, by mistake really, in the bathroom stall with two fingers jamming DamNear’s g-spot and her smooth white chin rubbing DamNear’s clit (because, like most people, she had her tongue about an inch too high), and DamNear was so excited she just quivered and her knees gave way and that was the first orgasm she hadn’t given herself.

After that there were lots of girls, girls and boys, and DamNear worked in the biz for a while mixing sound and they even cast her in some bondage flicks when she was sixteen. Oh yes, somewhere out there is a video of DamNear, and someone has jacked off to it a million times. Now there’s a thought to make ya smile.

Actually, right now that thought is making DamNear come.

When she finishes, she pulls her pants back up and smokes a little more, takes a hit off the bottle. Then she reaches into her nightstand and pulls out her weed and papers, starts to roll a joint.

DamNear hates Sundays. There is never anything to do.

nonowrimo day two, unedited