we should have known

We should have known it would be bad when we checked in and found a large chunk of human fecal matter floating in the toilet. Under normal circumstances, we would have just left the place. But this was Grandma’s 90th birthday party and this was the hotel that my mother and aunts had picked to host. It was the nicest place in town. When we complained about the excrement the desk clerk, a nineteen-year-old with a frizzy blond pony-tail whose mouth remained slack and eyes did not move while she informed us she could do nothing about the poop, neglected to apologize, and went back to filing her nails.

It was the end of June in the upper-Midwest. The hotel was full of our extended family, their dog-travel companions, their uninvited boyfriends and girlfriends, and everyone who had descended on the town for the state-wide paint-ball championship. For Grandma’s party we would be squeezed into a smaller room than the one we reserved because the hotel had double-booked the main conference room and the paintball guys were slightly more in number and considerably more in weight. For this, we would not receive a discount. We would also, find countless hairs in our free pancake breakfasts, watch my cousin declare that all women are stupid or else sluts and most are both, while my uncle leaned in to my fiancé to say “so many beautiful women in this room too bad I’m related to all of them,” sleep on sheets that smelt of old milk in rooms where most of the air conditioning didn’t work, where the cleaning women didn’t restock the acidic coffee and when Aunt Marion dressed as a nun and made us all call her Blessed Hildegard, my fundamentalist Cousin Doug—who had been busy introducing himself to everyone as being a member of MENSA— grabbed his wife’s arm so hard she bruised when he jerked her, probably, all the way back to North Dakota. Anyway, none of us saw him again but that was also when the army arrived, covered in red and blue paint.

-Shana Youngdahl of Iowa City, IA
http://www.madetomint.blogspot.com/