(Please note that from time to time I’ll put a short story on this website. My intentional fiction will be designated by the category “fiction” at the bottom of the post. Fiction found in my non-fiction posts are probably just lies. –ed)
The noises pulled at my mind like a bug bite in the unreachable territory of my middle back. As the darkened bedroom swam into focus, I could hear my upstairs neighbor's heels striking the hardwood floor above me. It was not the soft click clack that is associated with dress shoes and evening gowns but rather the bim-bam of three inch hardened rubber heals on black leather boots that go up to or even beyond the knee. I had been sleeping badly although I couldn’t really blame the upstairs tenants for that.
I turned over and looked at the clock, 3:43 am, and wondered if Laura would be angry if I called her at this hour. The cordless phone was laying on the nightstand, a dim rectangle bathed in the red digital glow of the alarm clock. I wondered what Laura’s schedule was for tomorrow. My alarm would go off in another two hours and 17 minutes and, if I didn’t want to be late for work, I would walk out the door no later than 41 minutes after that.
Something above me crashed and I thought that perhaps my upstairs neighbors were rearranging their furniture. I missed the old tenants that used to live in this building. They were older, quieter folks, who reminded me of cheap factory knock-offs of my parents' friends. They had slowly faded from the halls and the laundry room of the building being replaced one by one with the new updated version; twenty-something kids that were more hip, more transient, and more able to pay the rising rents of living downtown. In an odd sort of circle, they wore clothes that the old people might have worn in their younger days: black plastic framed glasses, beat-up denim jackets, and used plaid shirts.
The disappearing old set, I liked to imagine, had been employed as barbers, insurance agents, secretaries, that sort of thing. The new ones were 25-year-old junior advertising executives, web designers, and the occasional bartender roommates splitting the rent. The old ones had lived in the building, the news ones were simply stopping over for year or two. Of course that was who I was, what I wore, what I was doing, but I was here first, I had found the building first.
Not that I had ever talked to them, the new neighbors or the old ones. It wasn't that sort of building. With the old set, I'd occasionally get a nod, a hello, maybe even a friendly smile. The new set would also smile, but that smile was vaguely embarrassed, somewhat competitive, and didn't promote any further pleasantries. I once had a conversation with the couple that lived across the hall, but they moved out about a month before Laura did.
I don’t think that I could even visually recognize the people who had moved in. I did know they got the paper delivered daily. I occasionally pictured my unknown neighbors, if they ever smelled something strange coming from my door and it turned out that I had died or, perhaps had killed someone, telling the police that I was quiet and nice and seemed normal but that they didn't really know a thing about me. The same thing I would say about them if asked.
I reached out and picked up the phone, its solid weight somehow comforting and real in the liquid night world of my bedroom. Laura would at first be sleepy and confused and then sad. Eventually, there would be anger. Anger that I had called her at this hour, anger at me. Still, maybe she would want to talk. God, maybe she wouldn’t be alone. I started to dial, hesitated, and laid the phone down on the pillow next to me.
The only person in the building that I ever did talk to was Richard, the manager. I liked to think of him as the building super, because that term seemed somehow antique and rare, like the building. He was thin and quiet and it was hard to tell if he was a member of the older generation or the younger. He drove a beat up blue car but I often saw him zipping to and from the building on a bike. I know he had a storage room or two in the basement filled with furniture that he rescued from behind other old buildings, fixed up and sold. He had gray hair and a kind voice. I often wanted to ask him how long he had lived in the building, had been its manager, its super, but I felt that might have been rude in a way, like questioning someone's professional abilities. Laura had bought a table from him for her new apartment.
The clock, in its odd 1980’s robotic font, read 3:44 am and I was one minute closer to hearing its shrill alarm announce that I had to face the day. I was warm but hardly comfortable in my cocoon of flannel sheets and blankets. The beige brick of cordless phone rested on pillow next to me. I had programmed Laura’s number into its auto-dial memory after she had left and we were still talking regularly, her number was a two-button combination of flash and 9. Surely, she would be alone. She owed me that much. I tried to think of her actual phone number but could only think of how flash-3 was her parent’s number and flash-5 was mine.
I picked up the phone and its smooth plastic felt cool to my hand. I balanced it in my upright palm and then placed it back on the nightstand and turned onto my back. My eyes traced the dim geography of shadows and cracks in the ceiling and instead of trying to fall back asleep, I pictured my neighbors, in their thigh high boots, struggling to find that ideally perfect arrangement of furniture - perhaps the chair should go in the corner, the bookshelf against the outer wall - that would make their fourth floor world complete and wonderful and allow them to finally rest.
