The Spare Room

The room is a hollowed-out piece of the earth, a circular cave chamber with walls of soft, honey-colored tuff that hold the day’s heat like a warm breath. A single low bed, carved directly from the stone and topped with thick white linens, sits against the curved back wall. To the left, a small wooden table holds a copper pitcher and two glasses; above it, a recessed niche glows with the amber light of a single bulb. The air is still, smelling faintly of dust and dried lavender.

I stand in the center of it, my suitcase kicked haphazardly near the narrow stone archway that serves as a door, staring at the empty space where my reservation should have been. I have been a radiographer for twenty-two years, a job that requires precision, patience, and the ability to wait for the right angle to reveal the truth. I have waited five years to stand here, in Cappadocia, only to be bounced because the hotel double-booked and assumed a forty-four-year-old woman with a laugh like a foghorn would just… shrink.