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Description
The Inn of the Eighth Goat sniffed the lodger in 3B, and exhaled into the Sicilian sun the scent of old, tatty luggage and orange blossom lotion. The Inn tried again, dark floorboards listening to the lodger's bare feet as they walked from tiny bathroom down the hall, back into the room.

Some wanted Mediterranean white buildings and olives sucked from the fingers of browned men; others, a beach with buried metal coins. Or a red-and-white-checked diner on a quiet highway in dusty, lonely Arizona. Anywhere but here, this bland, four-room inn surrounded by skeletal trees clinging to yellow dirt. It was cheap, the mattresses were thin as wolves on winter islands, and it had nothing exotic or beautiful about it.

Except an abiding sense of its lodgers and where they wished, truly wished, to be. A deep, pleasurable sense of exploring their dreams and sending them there. In the morning, there would be nothing but useless boots or a single earring.

Some eventually returned to their lives, unsure how they got where they really wanted to go but bursting with the delight of that place that vibrated in their soul. Some never came back; the Inn found those most satisfying. A match made, and kept.

But this lodger was curiously devoid of such musings. The Inn watched from portrait eyes and painted suns on water jugs as the lodger ate tomatoes and peas in garlic butter; it measured moonlight in creases in the bed sheets and waited for the inevitable restless sleep to produce a desire to stand, to go to the window and look out on the hilly landscape, now barren and blue as the surface of the moon, and for that moment when all the lodger's thoughts drifted to that other place, that place where the heart wished, really and truly, to be.

It never came. The lodger sleep, as peaceful as a lamb against its mother in deep hay.

In the morning, both Inn and Innkeeper were surprised to the lodger descend the narrow staircase, white shirt buttoned askew, hair pulled into a lazy braid.

The Innkeeper never made breakfast for more than one: herself. She fiddled with pots of polenta and sausage, while the lodger admired the cutlery, a gift from a Countess long ago. And when the plate was in front of her, she lifted her face and smiled and said, "Thank you," and ate every bit of it.

The Inn understood, then, just as the Innkeeper did.

One woman removed her apron and went upstairs, not to room 3B, but to room 4, which had been locked for many years, the key lost. This morning, it opened at her touch. Inside, the air was cool, not the muffled heat of Sicily in August, but the near-chill of a pine forest, the floor coated with plush layers of fallen leaves. A bird whistled; it was a chickadee, flitting about in a stand of cedar.

The Innkeeper moved deeper into the shadows of the forest, looking for mushrooms, and silently, the door shut behind her.

And downstairs, the lodger in 3B took her dishes into the small kitchen and began to wash them. When she was done, she said aloud, "I will help you. There are many still to come. We'll help them find their place in the world, won't we?"

The Inn, at last, sighed. Orange blossom lotion. The Inn of the Eighth Goat had found its seventh Innkeeper.