So, the final teaser for Issue Two before its release on July 1. Newcomer Samuel Rutter’s story, ‘Comfort Inn’, is a laconic account of glancing connections set in Atlanta, Georgia.

It’s cold. He’s wearing a jacket – because you never put your jacket in your checked luggage – but it’s only a light jacket, and he’s only got a thin T-shirt underneath, and here it feels like it’s capable of snowing. He’s waiting on a concrete platform outside the airport in Atlanta, Georgia, waiting for a minibus because he has missed his connecting flight. He’s not the only one being put up at the Comfort Inn, but none of the others are looking at him, or paying him any attention. No one is talking at all. A girl in a leather jacket flicks a cigarette butt into the gutter. A mother smacks her child.

The lady at reception is fat and understanding: ‘Well, sir, that is an awful long way to come.’ He accidentally brushes her clammy hands as she gives him the key to his room, which is not a key but a plastic card twice as thick as a credit card. She is smiling, but her left eye is bruised and puffy.

His room is at the far end of the corridor on the fourth floor (he can take the elevator on the other side of the lobby), but no one is offering to show him the way. He doesn’t have any bags, either. He supposes that his luggage is in transit.

So this is America, he thinks. I’m not even supposed to be in America, I’m supposed to be in Mexico. The elevator walls are lined with mirrors, and he sees that he’s not looking too good after the flight. His face and his hair get so greasy. He pulls a stray nose-hair from his left nostril, which makes him sneeze all over the mirrored wall.

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