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Games That We Play

I’m not sure why that little hole under the stove, almost vertical into the floor, scares me so much. It’s just a hole and only goes back a couple inches or so into the cupboards, like an incompetent mouse dug it.

But there’s blackness in there, if only that little bit of it, and sometimes I can see things in it.

Not that the rest of this apartment isn’t just as dark, sometimes. I keep the lights off during the day and the lights on at night. But there are only a couple windows, so most of my apartment is cool and black during even the sunniest parts of the day.

Sometimes it’s dark enough that my head hurts, and sometimes even resting it against my grimy refrigerator doesn’t help. My head hurts when I see blood, too, like when I was outside last week and Suzie From Unit 102 skinned her knee while playing with her bicycle. Her mother cooed like a pigeon to keep her from crying, and I hurriedly dumped my trash before I developed one of these goddamn migraines. I don’t know what’s wrong with me sometimes, and it’s not like my job at 7-11 gives me great health insurance or something. I don’t have the money to see a doctor, I never have, and I don't like the syringes the doctors use.

I don’t see other people, really, either. Suzie and her mother were an exception. Sometimes I look through my peephole and spy on conversations that happen in my corridor, like when old Mrs. Tiggs from room 306 has an argument with her boyfriend, chiding him for cheating on her even though she’s seventy-five. But those conversations are far apart, and I only work two days a week on the graveyard shift. Barely anyone—just guys up to no good and nerds who can't sleep—comes in then.

How, then, do I keep an apartment? If I work so little? Well, this isn’t exactly Park Avenue, everything in this place was dirty when I got it and it’s retained the same charm; cleaning is not a task I take to kindly. Most of the time, if you want to clean well, you have to handle water, and I hate water. It makes my very bones shudder. So I just dust, you see, but everything’s getting blacker as the days wear on, and when the apartment caretaker comes in to fix the broken sink in the bathroom he’ll remark on the damp grime that covers every surface, verticle or horizontal. It’s none of his business, but he’ll remark on it, the dampness, and the coppery smell that comes out of that damned little hole under the stove.

My life isn’t glamorous, but I live it. (Is ‘live’ the right word? I can’t remember.) I don’t remember where I started out from originally, maybe as a baby I crawled out of the hole and festered here until they took me away to some orphanage I don’t remember now. And now that I’ve returned, the circle is full again. But I don’t have any idea. My earliest memories, you understand, are blackness and strange noises. Sucking, chewing, and clawing in the dark, horrifically loud and close by; it revisits me in my constant nightmares so much I can near duplicate the different sounds.

So, how old am I then? Young-looking, anyway, because people insist upon calling me “miss” if they have reason to, but I don’t feel young. I feel like a broken toy in the corner, forgotten by its child until the kid grows old enough to want to tear things apart. I’m broken, and maybe I’ll come apart some day…. I always think about it when I’m looking in the refrigerator—that cold, shuddering, dark space that reminds me of…

Something. Something.

Just now I’m sitting on a section of my kitchen counter, in jeans and a shirt that feel far too loose but were supposedly my size a year or so ago, waiting for something to happen. It’s nighttime, so the lights are on, and all of the inhabitants of the building are asleep—what will happen? Surely something must happen? I grow tired of sitting around in this old apartment sometimes, but the urge to be alone often overpowers any urge to socialize.

Not that all the outside world is simply socializing. I’ve often gone out at midnight and explored the entire apartment complex at length—Mrs. Tiggs’ door, rusted shut when it wants to be, with a coppery brown handprint on the old brass handle; 102 with bare splinters where the door once hung, Suzie and her mother are never home—but there’s only so much joy to be gleaned from an old complex like this. Sooner or later you’re in danger of falling down a few floors because of the old boards.

Tonight there was a little baby bird caught in a mess of old barbed wire, one leg ruined, parents hovering nearby—anxious but incapable of doing anything. I thought about scooping him up and taking him up here, putting a little Band-Aid around his leg to make it straight again. But the last time I helped an animal it ended up a twisted, grotesque shape in the bathroom, and I don’t remember how the poor cat even ended up there in the first place if I was keeping it in the washroom.

Something has to happen tonight. Something must happen.

I can hear the complex owner shuffling around outside my door, now, but there’s a strange metallic clinking I’ve never heard before—and the weight of his shoes on the floor is completely wrong.

A knock. The caretaker doesn’t knock like that, a solid one-two, his fist shakes when he tries to hold it still, and rattles when it hits against the door; I asked about it once but he told me he was just feeling weak, all the time.

I don’t answer for a few minutes, and I hope, even perhaps pray, that this stranger goes away though I’ve never been taught how to pray and who this God fellow is, but he knocks again. One-two-three. And then, his voice.

“Hello?” he calls through the door. “Anyone at home? I need some help!”

It’s one o’clock in the morning; I have a certain right to be nervous. And as I undo the old, clunky chains I’ve put to the door, he steps back a little bit. The harsh sound of the chain wasn’t what he was expecting.

He’s young, I notice, as I peek around the door. Dressed warmly for the cold night. “Do you have a phone I could use? My car’s broken down,” he explains. He seems taken aback that I’m female. They all are. But ultimately, he seems to relax.

I nod and open the door the rest of the way, standing aside to let him by. He smiles apologetically as he enters, and then stops before he gets to the phone.

“Jesus—you live here?” he asks me, turning around to appraise me a second time. I’m not liking the heavy sound of his shoes on my floor. My thin, bare feet merely click-patter along the surface, but he walks as though he were Goliath.

I don’t like talking normally, and answering his question seems a waste of air. I gesture with my thin, pale hands towards the phone and hoist myself back up onto the counter, only a foot or so away. He raises an eyebrow, but turns back to the phone.

At once, I know he’s phony. He doesn’t call up a real number, it’s much too disjointed. If he were a really smart crook, he wouldn’t try to pretend—

My phone’s dead.

I mean, not normally, but right now. My phone line obviously doesn’t trust him, and neither should I. He’s listening to that screaming hiss I get when I want to call someone I don’t know. Which is everyone. I forget, now.

“Guys, hey look, it’s me,” he begins.

“Your car didn’t break down,” I tell him.

He turns around, smiling a little bit. “You’re smart for someone who should be in an asylum,” he says.

That metallic clinking? That was a gun; maybe he was loading it. But at any rate, I’m staring into the barrel a moment later, and it’s a rusty model at that. If he knew me better, he’d know that pointing a gun was useless. There are stories going around, that the man who tried to rob my 7-11 didn’t commit suicide in the store, although the stories aren’t much more specific than that. He tore his throat open with a damned knife after trying to shoot me. I don’t know why. Am I just that ugly or something?

“You don’t want that,” I tell him evenly, sliding down from the counter. If my phone were undead, I’d call the police.

“Oh yeah? Well yes I do, and you’re not going to stop me.”

So maybe the man in the 7-11 didn’t commit suicide, maybe I helped him a little bit. I like to help people when they deserve it.

This man is so low he doesn’t, but I’ll make exceptions. It’ll be a few days and then he’ll be like the cat, a nauseating shadow of what he once was. All those dead rats in the hallway should have tipped him off.

But I still don’t like that hole under my stove.