Written for Muse on Monday where David asks us
to write a story about a blue collar worker.
Here’s where the prompt took me.
Adela wakes before the sparrows do.
4:47 a.m., and the alarm she never really needs pulls her from a dream she can’t hold onto …. something warm, something that smelled like her mother’s kitchen back in Oaxaca. She lets it go. There’s no time for it here.
She dresses in the dark so she won’t wake Mateo, who has school at seven. He is eight years old and speaks English better than she ever will, and sometimes she watches him do homework at the kitchen table and feels a love so fierce it frightens her.
By six she is at the hotel, her cart already loaded …. fresh linens stacked like clouds, miniature soaps arranged just so. Room 214. Room 215. She learns to read a room the way a doctor reads a patient: the scattered aspirins, the half-eaten birthday cake on the dresser, the single wine glass. People pass through and leave pieces of themselves behind, and Adela gathers what they’ve shed and makes each room anonymous again. Clean. Ready.
She does not talk much. She smiles when smiled at. She keeps her eyes on the work.
At lunch she calls her sister in Phoenix, ten minutes on a prepaid phone, just enough to hear that everyone is fine, everyone is fine. She eats a torta she made at midnight and sits near the loading dock where no one bothers her.
In the afternoon a supervisor she likes named Cheryl says, “good work today”, and Adela nods and means it when she says thank you.
After her shift she stops at the grocery, calculates in two currencies out of habit, buys the chicken thighs on sale. At home, Mateo has set the table without being asked. Two plates, two forks, a paper towel folded into a rough triangle. Trying to be helpful. Such a good boy.
She pulls him into a hug that surprises them both.
Outside, the city goes on being loud and cold and indifferent. Inside, something holds fast.
NAR©2026
This is “The Land That I Love” by Scott Ainslie
Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. If there’s something you would like to use, ask me; if I think it’s appropriate, I will usually agree. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.
The Elephant's Trunk 