The rooms are less than luxurious. Indeed, there are no rooms as such. Instead, an assortment of pup tents greets each visitor.
Pitched there haphazardly among the campsites nearest the inclines are numerous swirling corrosive mists. There, one almost stumbles upon them – the tents; rows of them but none too straight. Bent. Tarpaulin triangles with lightweight poles thrust harshly through ringlets in the canvas. Those poles will scrape away the gills from the fishless tourists – even the casual ones. As if there are any other kind.
The cheeky hurricanes overpopulating the less attractive neighborhoods are as insufferable as the boulders masquerading as maître d’s. They’ll tire you out before you’ve escaped the train depot. On a positive note, however, they rarely demand a tip.
Leave your gills at home or at least secured in your Samsonites with their adorable little locks and undersized wheels since the surface temperature exceeds the highest setting on most household ovens by 400° and the atmospheric pressure is 90 bars, making the possibility of palms trees, coral, or even seraphs remote at best. And a consular mocking at worst. It’s hot.
One’s luggage locks will be replaced by soldered teardrops before one resets one’s wristwatch. And the wheels will drop out of their chassis like pregnant peaches. There are no flies in the ointment because the flies are bits of ash. Torn bits of muscle. Poorly crafted limericks. Jots. Invariably, they’ll stick in your teeth. Bring floss.
The black and white photographs of the country’s navel reveal something like the inside of a backyard grill that’s been left on all night to cook itself to death. The color photographs disclose tints from the smeary mustard sands. Smeared vindictively. It’s as if she’s cooked her own navel and served it to herself on a platter too hot to touch and then finger-painted on herself with a slightly rotted flaxen rouge. It’s all rather banal.
The coastlines are ignored by the locals and for good reason. The surf is irredeemable, the jellyfish are commonplace, and the sharks guest host Food Network programs.
If it was a kiln it would bust apart. Hotter than an apogee furnace into which someone might cram an accidentally suffocated corpse – to remove any trace of it. To make it go away. To make bones bygone. So, consider a few smart linen outfits; leave the wool blazers in Amiens.
‘Cooking long after the springs are punched out. Roasting without rest – Unpacking, you’ll find a too-thick-hot-soup,’ reads a rival travel guide (tactfully omitting the wrench-like mercury-filled bread sticks from the menu).
Another competitor notes: ‘No grasses sprout, no breathing-into-nostrils-of-dust-balls was ever even contemplated; it’s pristine’ (mercurially pretermitting the inorganic fescue).
Another: ‘Spare, terse, desiccated, uncompromising.’
“A life-changing destination for the suicidal,’ wisecracks the last.
Accordingly, we recommend arranging one’s exit visa prior to arrival. Don’t rely on the expertise of their functionaries. The agents are irredeemable. It almost seems as if custom and immigration forms haven’t been invented there yet.
Simmons is a lawyer, a law professor, and a lifelong South Dakotan. His scholarship and teaching focuses on trusts and estates.. His poems can be found in El Portal, Corvus Review, Nebo, North Dakota Quarterly, Nine Muses, The Write Launch, The Showbear Family Circus, and elsewhere. His first full length collection titled “Tod Browning Loose-leaf Encyclopedia” was published by Cyberwit in 2020.