The first time it happened, I thought the landlord was playing a hidden camera prank on me. I shouted so loud that it made the radiator vibrate. I moved out a month later out of embarrassment and tried to shake my deposit back out of his inbox, but gave up pretty soon.
The chipped apartment swings open, and the musky wood smell pinches my nose again. The landlord will pretend to care about the peeling ceiling, and I’ll pretend to be curious. I am suffering from the world’s most boring curse: Every flat I’ve lived in looks absolutely identical, the same parquet floors, the same four windows, the same speckled kitchen counter with the same alligator bite taken out of it. The curse has its uses. If the rent gets too high, I pick up sticks and find the same place in another neighbourhood. Once, Annie stood up too fast, sprinting to piss, and she knocked over the glass table. The table wanted to die and left a gash in the floor when it finally did. I covered the split with an ugly rug and moved into the same apartment, except down the road and without the trench in the living room.
It’s a normal three rooms, but only to me. The wind outside the window blows way too fast. You can hold a paper airplane out there and watch it zip off like a dog’s running away with it in its mouth, and even when the apartment’s on the top floor of the building, you can hear banging above. There was a night when I thought I saw an eye through one of the HVAC grills, but I’d been up for three days, so I don’t trust myself.
The only thing that changes is the wood thing above the bed. Wood thing has five animal faces carved into the left side. The first four are the crab, the snake, the emu (ostrich?), and the cow. There’s debate about what the fifth face is, but most people land on a mammal. We’ve had five votes for fox, three for rat, three for mouse, and one for meerkat, but rat wins because rat and mouse are the same animal. To the right, there is a coloured line for each animal, like glowing syrup dripping down grooves. The lines feel like glass and don’t stop extending. They grow too slow for you to see, but they do grow. The snake is furthest along, then the emu, the cow, the crab, and finally, ratmouse.
I’m writing this now because snake almost completed its line two months ago. I felt proud of the line when I first saw it. The same week, my friend Rachel needed somewhere to stay before she flew to Denver. I let her stay in my bed while I laid on the couch and fell asleep watching fucked up grocery hauls. Rachel had a dream about being in an alley with pools of orange light all the way from one end to the other, even though there were no street lights. In the dark, in between the circles, she saw the outline of a thick, twisting floating string. I think I said, “Cool” when she told me the next morning. She didn’t mention it again after that, but all the times I saw her afterwards, she had bags under her eyes. She only had bags under her times sometimes before. Then she disappeared off the map, December and January. I asked Annie if she thought the snake got her and saw her disappointed that I even made the joke. It was a stupid thing to say.
Rachel showed up at my door again last night, out of the blue. She had a beaten-up overnight bag next to her like a little dog. She lifted up one side of her shirt, and there, right in the side of her midriff, were two big red round scabs. I don’t want my friend to go, I don’t want to miss her, so I wondered if, just for once, moving might get me away from wood thing. Wherever I go, I’m home.
