I drafted this story in 2013 after seeing an illustration by the artist Eric Petersen on Tumblr:

I was so struck by the strange beauty of the image,  with its bold colors and deep-focus perspective. As I looked at it more closely, I wondered why these people were all looking in the same direction at...nothing? Each other?

So I had the idea that maybe they had heard something coming from that end of the motel, which--me being me--led me to imagine that something awful had happened. Instead of describing the event at the time it happened, I thought it would be more interesting if someone who had been there was recounting it, and, like me, couldn't quite capture the strangeness of it.