WHICH FLOOR?

Artwork by DALL·E

She brings cold air and a flurry of dead leaves into the lobby. The gush of heat feels good at first, but it will soon feel oppressive and stale. She will sleep in shorts and with her window open, just a crack, invisible from the street below. She has no fire escape, a perk.

It isn’t late, but already dark. Her steps quicken as the elevator door ahead starts to close. It’s an old building, and to wait again for the singular car is to wait twenty minutes. Her shoes clack along the tile floor like a heavy rain. She needn’t rush; a hand untethered from the rest of a body juts out just in time, ushering her inside.

Hairy fingers, nails not long enough to suggest neglect but long enough to have collected black lines of flotsam from the city. She clocks the Help button, and her potential options. She is aware of the small space, the intimate proximity to a stranger, the fact he remained standing toward the middle, not adjusting his spatial footprint to accommodate a second occupant. She makes herself smaller to scooch by him. She stands tucked against the far corner, facing the ancient door as it closes.

“Thanks for holding,” she says. The light above an accusation, not in keeping with the wood paneling and dark green floor of the pre-war building.

Taller than her, heavier too. Older, though not by much. Bulky sweater, loose jeans. No coat despite the chill. Receding sandy hair, giving way to grays. Smooth skin that looks more like a child than the middle-aged man he is. Glasses, the kind that remind her of both Superman and Wanted posters. Is he handsome? Is he ugly? Does it matter?

“Sure thing,” he replies.

Where do you sleep at night?

“I’m sorry?”

“I asked which floor you’re on?”

“Oh, eight. Thanks.”

“I’m on nine. Right on top of you.”

Headphones in, music off. She thinks of the keys in her pocket, fingers them like a rosary. She thinks of her best friend, tracking her location from her house across the country. They know each other’s coordinates, and she is tracking her, too. But they are both at home, so what good does it do?

The elevator groans and slowly ascends. She senses him looking at her out of the corner of his eye. She is careful to look straight ahead at the buttons smudged with other people’s fingerprints. She smells the greasy odor of other people’s takeout orders, the cold smoke from the cigarette he must have just had outside, and beneath all that, the dank stench of her own sweat forming beneath her coat. The prickle of awareness that could, in an instant, turn to fear. What is the difference, anyway, between awareness and fear?

—

The cab driver who tried to push his way into her last apartment, the reason she ultimately moved. His spit trailed against the glass once she got the door shut. A moment of uncomfortable, heightened, angry eye contact. She looked out of her darkened window from floors above for an hour, until he left, and slept with plates stacked in front of her door and a knife beneath her pillow.

The men who call her baby on the sidewalk, then bitch when she crosses the street.

The ones who follow too closely behind her, who like her body when they think it’s available, find it revolting as soon as they learn it’s not.

—

Nice tits.

“What?”

“Nice weather we’re having,” he says.

“Oh. Yeah.”

“I was being sarcastic. I’m sick of this cold.” Did his voice just get icy? Suddenly, she is aware she is not playing the game right. She smiles brightly and says, I am sick of the cold, too.

The elevator crawls.

—

Her mother making her change into sweatpants instead of her nightgown when her uncle stayed on the couch. The burn of shame as if this was something important that she should have already known. The early introduction to the lifelong monitoring of men to ensure they were ok. Uncomfortable at best, tempted at worst.

The grown men who craned their necks out of their cars when driving by as soon as she hit the age of twelve. The friends of her father, fathers of her friends.

Her seventh-grade history teacher said she was mature and pretty for her age. Different than the other girls in class. She blushed. She saw him years later as a high school junior, and he said she’d really grown. He blushed. She hated that it felt like power.

The boyfriends who wanted her until they didn’t, then wanted her again once they were married. Morphing her into a scab to women she’ll never meet. She held a phone full of secrets. The fact that they know she’ll never detonate the bombs they’ve wrapped in candy colored paper and given to her willingly, with a pack of matches.

When her mentor put his hand on her thigh under the table at a work dinner, squeezing it harder the more she pulled away. A smile plastered to her face for the others at the table. He never responded to her emails again.

—

“I’ve seen you around the building,” he says now as the elevator groans and lifts. I’ve noticed you when you haven’t been looking, when you haven’t been careful, when you haven’t been on your game.

The silence is thick. She knows there is something she should say, but can’t bring herself to.

“Not very neighborly, are ya?”

“Just tired. I’m sorry,” she says and hates herself.

Maybe he’s lonely, maybe she’s cruel. Maybe neither. Maybe both.

—

Fool me once. Fool me twice, shame on me, shame on me, shame on me.

—

The elevator opens.

“Have a nice night. See ya around.” I’ll be watching.

She turns left and waits for the suction sound of the door closing, holds her breath. She goes right. Where she lives, where she will forget.

Until tomorrow.

Originally published in The Dumbo Press.