My mother is running a small hotel. The foyer is large, and looks like a converted orchestra hall; like something off of the titanic. Immediately behind the foyer is a single hotel room. I don't believe it odd that my mother maintains a hotel with just one room. This fact seems very normal. No one seems to visit this hotel, and I do not remember seeing my mother, although it is her business.
I'm visiting, and I'm aware that mother allows me to stay at the hotel in this room. My wardrobe of suits, dress shirts and ties hang in the sliding door closet beside the bed. I organize and reorganize the closet's multiple tiers. Perhaps for efficiency, maybe due to worry or boredom.
An old woman enters the darkened lobby, and rings the front desk bell. She wants to book a room. I (and I assume my mother, although I never see her) experience that sensation of being unprepared for a professional interaction: like the first person who shows up at a yard sale in the early morning - you feel woefully unprepared, and rush to compensate.
Leaving my clothing in the room, the woman simply walks in, and sets up in the room - closing the door behind her. I'm left standing in the darkened foyer, as the last light of day filters in through the windows.
I set up spare sheets on the sofa on the foyer right side, underneath the stairs. Echoes of structure from my high school flicker around me. A party, a situation - both those are all dreams within a dream.
The next morning, the old woman who rented the room demands breakfast, and I stumble over setting up a cafeteria meant for hundreds of people for the sole guest. Large packages of shrimp, giant bags of ketchup.
The woman leaves on errands as I clean up. Afterwards, I sit down at a glass table at the top of a staircase above the rented room. I notice the old woman left her knitting and a leather bound tome. Curious, I open the book and see "Spells, and ways of speeding up time" is the topic of the first page.
Outside, a large group of people are on the beach. It's evening, and they're concerned over how to cook an entire dismembered elephant. I offer my help, using the information containing in the old woman's book. I speed up the cooking process of the elephant in a matter of seconds, and the strange beach-goers consume the elephant whole - legs sitting on the sand like sitting logs at a campfire.
The process of speeding up the cooked flesh seems to continue long after the people consumed the elephant: the meat's accelerated time frame causes it to putrefy and rot minutes after it's been consumed. People rush away from the beach to be sick somewhere, except a single man sitting by the campfire. He smiles, and offers me some of the french fries he'd been eating instead.
