How I Became a Motel 6

Hybrid/Experimental, Mitchell Ny

As I walk in the abyss, only the clunk of my white Nike Air Force Ones illuminates the soundscape of the pool area at our local Motel 6. I’m pacing in my cool kid shoes. All the cool kids from our little 50/50 Asian/Latino neighborhood have them. Now, so do I. And now that ugly gesture—a flash of the chink-eyes—from across the street metamorphosed into a nod of mutual coolness. Safety and belonging cost a measly 16 hours of my minimum wage time. 

In our neighborhood, the signs of restaurants and small businesses are displayed only in Spanish or Chinese or Korean—unless it’s McDonald’s. The glow of golden arches blooms off the bottoms of my wet shoe soles as I circle the pool. Blonde beams fluoresce off my feet—like the one white person I knew growing up. We called him Sasquatch and we were good friends.

A sickly pinkish hue oozes on the horizon, revealing the ozone’s chemical burns and I question if it is dawn or dusk. It beckons, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” The dawn-dusk allows just enough light to reveal the pink matter on my shoes—I’ve dirtied them with vomit or blood or ice cream or something other. I look back and see a trail of pink tracks overlapping in the wake of my pacing. This is my home base when there is nowhere else for me. From outside, the whole of Motel 6 is crumbling, but behind tonight’s door 104, clean sheets and a hot shower will welcome me home. The musty Holy Bible in the drawer smells like safety, even when the places it’s meant to sanctify are not. It has pages torn out, as if there were parts of the story I was never meant to see. But even in places like this, Genesis 1:1 always survives.

 In the beginning, there was the stickiness of trichome crumbs and ashes tracing a jettison toward bliss. The pages that remain ask me, “How was your day? Have you eaten? Someone loves you. You were always bad—actually, you were born that way. And here’s all the ways you’ll fail to fix it.” No portraits of the saved had faces like mine anyway.

But Motel 6 said, “Hello, I love you. This is love.” And love was how many people I could summon to celebrate my winnings—measured by the damage they left. Ten points if you scare the crowd with police sirens on the speakers. Fifteen if someone jumps out the window. Another fifteen for the three burns on the carpet from hookah coals that fell over. I’m worth forty points and three thousand dollars in check-out fees. Double the score when a cop pulled me out of my shitty car and slammed me against the hood for sleeping in it. Now, I pace. And with every peelback of my heel, the pink matter caked on my soles replies like unfastening velcro—minus points. But who’s counting anymore? 

Motel 6 is the collector of firsts. When I see the staircase to the doors 200+, I can hear the sounds of pasta stirring in my ears. It’s where a fair-weather friend stomped on the face of someone who dared to look at him sideways. The cacophony mutated from crunching cartilage to pasta and whimpers. Still, the stomps cratered at a steady, unending tempo. All while my face played a dissonant counter-rhythm with my teeth-made metronome chattering at 1000 beats per minute. Whenever I pass staircases now, I imagine an Olive Garden up top, tossing fettuccine for their endless pasta bowls—and the turning in my stomach defaults to hunger. I wonder if the ritual Cheetos-for-breakfast is worth ending my poolside pacing while the pavement is cracking beneath my feet.

This is where I became the Hero of Concrete. Where stray steel lashed at my people, and I sent steel and its master flying down the staircase. “You’re a protector,” the staircase says. “Finally, a real man you’ve become.” 

Now, downbound stairs sound like falling bodies—the clang of metal on brick and mortar reverberates, knocking at my sternum from inside my ribcage. I’m ordained the duty of hearing the songs of stairwells with my feet fused to the ground floor. 

At Motel 6, I collected from my brothers a molar each and I keep them in the coin pocket of my jeans. They were there for every climb or descent of every stairwell. And I’m terrified they will forget the stairwells we have climbed together. I have a jar of loose change in my car, where my spare tire should be. So every speed bump in the lot of Motel 6 jingles to remind me it's my turn to treat my boys to Cheetos-for-breakfast. 

Light crests overhead; dawn-dusk stretched into day, with a variance of twelve hours. I’ve paced myself twelve feet deep in the pool area of our local Motel 6, surrounded by brown dirt, veiled in concrete. I won’t call for help. “No one can save us,” I say—with brick, dirt, stairs, and pink matter. The Grand Choir. I will stay here in my home base, where my shoes recognize the petrichor. I’ll sleep in the foundation of Motel 6. 

***

Peering through the O of the "6", my sight is vignetted by my glowing red lashes—haloed by neon tubes. I see a young man spilling from behind door 104. He makes his way to the parking lot and trudges back with a box of pizza and a baggie of assorted sauces. Delicate fingers reach out from 104, beckoning him back. His trudge becomes a joyful trot. As with every morning lately, he stops at the glow of the big red “6” from up above, staring straight back into the O. 

And I said to him, “Hello, I love you. This is love.”

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Mitchell Ny is a Cambodian-Taiwanese writer based in Southern California. His work appears in Maudlin House, in Bending Genres, and he was a finalist for ALR’s 2026 Nonfiction Contest. He writes to wring from the mess: the scrappy, the ugly, and the brazenly beautiful.

More at minutia.works. On X: @minutiayaps. On Bluesky: @minutia.works. On IG: @michobug