June 1987, just outside of Hargrove, Tennessee. A highway motel with a flickering vacancy sign and a jukebox that played songs no one had ever heard. I was passing through that night, around two in the morning, when I stopped at the Elms Motor Lodge because the rain was coming down hard and I needed a place to lie low. The clerk at the desk was a woman named Cora—tired, mid-fifties, a name tag worn smooth at the edges. She told me I could have any room except number seven, and when I asked why not, she just looked at me with something like pity. I took room six, right next door. Through the thin walls I heard the jukebox in the lobby start up on its own at three thirty-three, playing a song that sounded like a woman singing from underwater. Cora never said much, but the next morning when I checked out, she handed me a cassette with no label and told me to listen to Side B when I got far enough from the motel. I've never played it. It's sitting in a box in my closet. But sometimes, late at night, I think about that song—the way it pulled at something in my chest, like a memory I never had. This is that story.