Heather
poetry by Ashlyn Sharp
Heather
The day after Harambe died, I was stripping beds
at the Comfort Inn with Heather. I flinched at hints
of smoke on her breath, shrinking away
from her voice, the early gray of her hair. But she
taught me everything I needed to know
about cleaning. She had been clean
for one year. Heather’s twenty-something daughter
was going on three months herself by virtue
of a job with her mother at a hotel. Heather flipped
on the news in each room as we went, shedding
mattresses and pillows of their skins like snakes. She laughed at the red
-lipped newscaster showing the video of Harambe. “Everyone’s
mad about this,” I said, “The gorilla was just in its cage. The zookeeper
was only doing his job.” She laughed, that yellow-toothed, meth-stained
laugh, like she knew a thing or two about that. Heather’s daughter
left a crack pipe in a housekeeping cart. I left two
jugs of milk sitting out by the refrigerator and said I didn’t do it. Someone
just bought more milk. Heather never made excuses.
She didn’t blame the child on the gorilla, she blamed the addict
on the mother. Either way, the gorilla got shot and her daughter
got fired and I just kept coming in to work. Heather
learned my mother’s name. Heather sang to me on my birthday, scratchy
and off-key, each note echoing down the hall between rooms 219 and
225. I caught her crying the day after they let her daughter go. Heather
didn’t mean for any of this to happen. Heather wanted so much more
for her grandbabies: a mother who wasn’t an addict, a grandmother
who wasn’t a felon, who could get jobs other than cleaning up
after sixty-six dollar guests, who could keep her teeth white, her paystubs
in neat stacks next to receipts from the grocery store. But I
was only eighteen. I scrubbed ashtrays for tuition
money. I dragged bags of broken glass bottles dripping
out to the dumpster knowing no one was waiting for me
at home. On my last day at the Comfort Inn, I didn’t
see Heather. I didn’t say goodbye. I just lumbered
through the sliding glass doors, spotless where I had washed
them, like a zookeeper walking out
of a gorilla’s enclosure, gun
still in hand.
Ashlyn Sharp
Ashlyn Sharp is an undergraduate student of Creative Writing at Utah State University, where she interns with Sink Hollow Literary Journal. In 2018, she was named a finalist for the Swenson Legacy Poetry Contest, and has work appearing in Whale Road Review and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter @ashjenn6.