I was supposed to review a motel room on Route 9 for a website that pays ten dollars per write-up. The Blue Moon Motel outside Wisteria, Ohio, had twelve rooms, a flickering sign, and a vacancy that never seemed to change. The manager handed me the key to Room 6 without looking up from his magazine, and I walked down the breezeway past windows dark as unlit screens. The room was clean enough, but the closet door was open, and inside someone had written a message in what looked like nail polish across the back wall. I took a picture, loaded my bag back into the car, and drove to the diner to write the review. But I kept thinking about the writing—its angles, its stillness—and when I looked at the photo I'd taken, the letters had changed. They spelled something else now, something I hadn't seen in the room, something that knew I was alone in a booth at two in the morning with the world asleep and the Blue Moon Motel's sign blinking in my rearview.