Sourmouth Read Free Page A

like she was an irritated chicken, “I’m sorry,
but I cannot. The people there and in every room have already paid and are
mostly made up of our regulars. At this time of year there’s only a few places
open to serve visitors, so if I turned away any of them, there’d be nowhere for
them to go. And next time they would choose not to do business with the Olde Cove. I’m sorry, but I cannot”.
    Riley closed his eyes in order to try to calm himself.
There was one important tidbit of information in that barrage of excuses, “You
said that there would be nowhere for ‘them’ to go if you kicked them out? What
does that mean for us if they can’t find another hotel?”
    At this point the painted flapper looked as if she
might start bawling at any moment, “Sir, without a reservation I doubt you will
find another place to stay...”
     
    #
     
    “Damn it all to hell!” Riley roared as they stormed
out of the hotel and down the creaking wooden steps to their car, “We need this
like we need sperm- flavoured ice cream. How can
everything go wrong for us within the span of two hours? Have we offended some
sort of god? Would everything suddenly look up if I slaughtered a goat?”
    Violet tossed her luggage into the back of the rental
car, “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong. But I do know that not
everything has gone south. I guess. I mean, we both got here alright, didn’t
we?”
    “I’m pretty sure that you vomited on a duck on the way
in,” Riley retorted.
    “We got our rental car...” she continued before he was
able to interject further.
    “Which will probably have its brakes fail just as
we’re coming down a winding road on the mountain. We’ll fly off the side and
end up in the ocean like we’re in an action movie”.
    “Fuck. Ok...” she said in frustration as she slapped
her thighs with her hands, “we have each other. For what it’s worth, we’re
still together instead of suffering somewhere all alone”.
    Now as much as he wanted to continue to vent, Riley
was stopped dead in his tracks with her sappiness, which honestly he saw as a
cheating way to try and calm him down.
    “Did...did you want to grab a bite to eat? I think we
could both use something to help ease our nerves. And you don’t even have
anything left in your stomach anyway,” he said with a defeated huff.
    Violet just nodded her head, first in acknowledgement
and then towards the eatery just to the side of the Olde Cove.
    The restaurant was a novelty joint called The Red
Wolf’s Choice. It was essentially a small, rectangular shaped stone box that
looked like it fell out of a 1950s children’s cartoon. It seemed to be the type
of place that kids would have gone after school to get thick malted milkshakes
and break out in song and dance numbers. The worn walls were painted over with
an obnoxious bright yellow with thin red strips of lightning along the sides,
all of which pointed to just adjacent of the entrance at a large cartoon wolf
with a chunk of meat and bone between his jaws.
    The name of the diner sat on top of the roof, jotting
outward to the right side with an old Christmas wreath hung over the letter “f”
in “wolf”, most likely a lucky toss from some bored teenager. The front windows
looked like they hadn’t been washed in a year and the glass in the entrance
door was starting to crack from the bottom up. Somehow the duo didn’t see the
meal coming from this place as the start of their tide turning.
    But inward they went to find that the interior décor
was fashioned much like the kitschy exterior. The walls were painted a fainter
yellow than the outside was, as not to irritate the people who were tolerant
enough to sit inside and sip their coffee there. Along the walls were tightly
grouped booths for four with bright red pleather seats with what appeared to be
sparse plastic green trees strapped to the wall behind them in order to give
the appearance of people sitting in the woods. It clearly