Courtyard Henna

A Story by Abishai100

A writer may change course after discovering some intolerable 'darkness' linked to a news-event inspiring real humility.

An offbeat if haunting tale of Homeland expressions, loosely inspired by Cat's Eye (Stephen King).

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The Courtyard hotel is where Amlan Satan ended up to begin work on his novel about haunted inns and places of stay in the United States but was about to realize his field-research would draw him towards a revelation of tragedy even he didn't want to deal with personally, despite having much interest in re-presenting the building on social-media for modern tourism exchanges.

He wanted to write this story about an Atlantic-City showgirl named Esmerelda who wished to stay at the very-same Courtyard hotel he was staying at to write his novel and who committed suicide under very strange auspices, leading this pensive/serious American writer to consider why a very American woman would seek to give up on the Western-world of personality/fortunes. He wished to share this image of tragedy on social-media with other writers (including the great Margot Patterson).

While he was staying at the Courtyard, he started to seriously think he was falling in love with the haunting specter/memory of this lone woman from Atlantic-City who lost all her money while gambling and was in debt to a very bad man and decided to commit suicide in the bathtub instead of charting out her fate to oblivion. The room, the same one Satan stayed in to write her story into a modern American horror-novel, had this eerie tragic aura to it (now).

AMLAN SATAN: "While enjoying a very zesty bowl of Thai-shrimp soup I ordered online and had delivered to my Courtyard room, I realized that the flavor/enjoyment of the moment drew in me a special stranger feeling that I was becoming 'too close' to the experience of this dead Atlantic-City girl of tragedy in the Homeland."

The life of an Atlantic-City showgirl is quite complex and surreal and it can also be quite challenging and trying in a very realistic sort of way, and that's what this tragic tale revealed concerning the life/death of the showgirl Amlan Satan chose to write about and while inside her hotel-room, he swore he felt her breathing on his neck and dreamt they made love together!

AMLAN SATAN: I decided to visit the cemetery/tombstone where the showgirl Esmerelda laid-to-rest and once more felt her spirit/specter/ghost breathing on my neck, but we'd already made love really (in my dream-sleep encounter!) and I now knew she didn't want me to write her story, to keep her tragic suicide-note revelation a secret enough not to be applied to any 'professional' write-up, so I've abandoned my mission to instead write a (fictional) tale of an Atlantic-City post-grad American woman named Tandy who finds fortune to fund her mother's operation and restores her faith in capitalism-race ethos, and that's what I drew from the cemetery visit that day in America --- a superstitious sense of grounded/humbled honor (wow).

What we learned from Amlan Satan's eventual Pulitzer-winning American novel about this Atlantic-City woman (Tandy) who funded her mother's operation after winning a fortune in the casino-resort reflection city-by-the-sea in the Homeland and restored her faith in capitalist ambition spirits was that his 'abandoned dream' of writing about Esmerelda (Courtyard) the showgirl, a nonfiction-news adapted dramatized account, suggested that some images of aspiration yielding darkness simply remind us of the Realism of isolationism.