The Tranquility Anthology

=The Ultracheese=

Alex was an old crooner and loyal customer to Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino.

And he'd messed up big time with a customer just as loyal as he.

He trudged down the corridor, eggshell-coloured walls with hexagonal patterned carpets, a golden hue to the view set by those retro orange sconces shaped like mushrooms.

Sometimes it felt like he'd lived a thousand different lives within these walls.

Alex had passed the red doors down this corridor countless times, however the only one he ever cared about was the one his vision trained on the entire walk to it.

He heard his footsteps bringing him closer to it, to room 505.

Today the dawn wouldn't stop weighing a tonne; that is, the dawn of a two-week long night on the moon.

He stood face-to-face with the golden numbers. 505. He first stayed in 521, an alright suite, but next to it, in room 522, a pianist had been staying with his family when Alex had arrived. Eventually he could only take so much of the plonking of piano notes until all hell broke loose. It stayed between them, Steinway, and his sons.

Gulping, he looked down to his shaking knuckles, forming the fist needed to knock a door. Arabella wasn't expecting one, or maybe she was. Knocking on doors was how it all started, perhaps now it was how it ended.

Once a temporary hostess at the resort, now a permanent lunar resident, as per his request. The very thought of it clawed at his throat. Yet by the time he'd asked her to stay, around two years into their relationship, she'd already fallen in love with the moon.

At that point, Arabella forgot her job was only temporary, enchanted by the escape from post-modern life back on Earth.

Enough was enough. Alex shook off the fears and knocked on the door again, the same raps as he had done thirty years before.

her muffled voice took a while, but eventually it came through. "Come in."

He grasped the golden door knob, slowly letting his body in through a tight space. There he saw her.

Arabella's sitting frame, now as old and as weary as he, was looking at the pictures on the wall, face angled away and arms crossed, from a plush red velvet armchair. Age had pushed down the auburn locks for silver ones, but to him she would always be a redhead.

Alex grew closer, too afraid to catch her eyes, to see the fiery rage in them. Like the senile old man he was, he walked closer.

He peered around, looking at those same photos and towards the guitar in the corner of the room. The neatly made bed, courtesy of housekeeping. The wide celestial view in the window with blinking gold lights in the distance shining 'Casino', a new addition which Alex had found a bit tacky for the hotel.

"Still got pictures of friends on the wall?" said Arabella, not looking at him as much as he wasn't looking at her. Alex brought his gaze back to those photos, ignoring the awkwardness of the question she'd asked.

In most of them, it was him and her, at the back of the Lunlumo bar, in a booth like they usually were, with newfound friends who'd briefly stayed at Tranquility. A writer. A pianist, yes, the same one that drove Alex wild. A public figure. A celebrity. The old hotel owner. A rock band from Sheffield. He studied all of those old faces he once knew.

"I suppose. But I suppose we aren't really friends anymore," Alex mumbled, eyes avoiding her for no good reason.

"Maybe you shouldn't ever have called that thing friendly at all," Arabella mused, a sharp undertone in the way she said it.