For us guests of the first Academy Awards at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel by Louise Hurrell

the party’s been going since May 1929; we’ve chugged so much champagne it’s a miracle we’re still on our feet. We’re over a hundred years old, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still jive, our phantom limbs swaying in the air like cigar smoke. Our make-up is smeared; our suits and dresses in tatters. Yet we never stop. The jazz band blares twenty-four seven, so we spin and spin and spin; little planets orbiting the chandelier sun.

For silent film stars, we make a lot of noise. Shrieking, laughing, arguing, fucking—days and nights blended into one giant afterparty, like the ones we had after filming, when as soon as the director yelled “cut”, we cut loose. Sure, our throats are raw and our soles bleed, but who doesn’t want to party forever, bodies melting into one another? Our sweat glitters like the precious jewels we wear.

There’s only one fly in our ointment: the hotel manager’s such a square. He keeps yelling over the music, accusing us of driving the other guests away. They refuse to come into the Blossom Ballroom, he says, because there are dead people in there. But we have never felt so alive! We try to explain but he doesn’t listen. He dumps garlic around the room; pointless, as we aren’t vampires, and we just use the cloves as cocktail garnishes. He hires ghosthunters, so we hide under tables, hands clasped to our mouths, stifling giggles. One day though he goes too far—he removes all the booze from our bar.

We’re bereft. Some of us go quiet; others start swearing, kicking chairs. We visit the manager in his office, all of us piling on top of each other. He glares.

Why don’t you leave?

We picture our mute coffins and sober bodies. Us doing nothing but lying there with our clear-eyed memories; our regrets and sorrows wriggling worms across our flesh. Eternal rest sounds unbearable. We point to Janet Gaynor, still clutching her Best Actress statuette. She was in a terrible car crash and never fully recovered. We point to a drugged-up producer. All four of his wives left him. Slowly we go around the room, picking at the scabs of our lives. He had to stay in the closet. She lost her career when the talkies arrived and died of an overdose three years later. The manager doesn’t seem to understand or care, until we point to a director. His daughter was stillborn. The manager says nothing, but we see the tears glazing his eyes. The next day the booze is back.

The band starts playing again. We sway and twist, but our movements are slow now. The jokes are forced; our laughs too high-pitched. We try to argue or screw, but our hearts aren’t in either. Eventually we fall silent. The ballroom turns cold. We drift aimlessly across the hardwood floor, remembering, our lives’ wreckage trailing behind us like the crumpled rags of our gowns.   

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LOUISE HURRELL — Louise is a writer from Dundee, Scotland. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Temple in a City, The Broken Spine, and The Waxed Lemon amongst others, and has won the Golden Hare at the 2026 Edinburgh Flash Fiction Awards. When not scribbling, she can be found haunting the fusty corners of museums.

Art by CATERINA MINEZZI — Whether applied with a brush or a dip pen, ink is definitely Caterina’s preferred medium to create her dark surreal works. Born in a small town near Bologna, Italy in 1990, she had a love for the bizarre and the macabre since she was a child, but she started drawing consistently only after the pandemic. The cycle of life and death, metamorphosis, and all the uncomfortable things are the most recurring themes in her art, balanced with some fun and grotesque here and there.