1612 W. Washington by Lillie E. Franks

At first, we’re haunted softly, like a pink sky overtaken by the creeping evening. Ms. Perez, who is proud to still live alone, calls the rental company to complain about a dripping sound she only hears at night. She’s almost sure it comes from the living room, not the kitchen, and no, there are no discolored spots on the walls or ceiling. The two kids in the unit downstairs tell Mr. and Mrs. Berry that when they got home from school, an invisible man was walking in the house. Curtis bangs his hand on the table to show what it sounded like. Clomp-clomp-clomp-clomp. While he’s falling asleep, Isaac, who lives in 3B with a guy he met on Craigslist, feels something grab his foot and tug it gently. He sits up in bed, assuming Kyle is trying to get his attention, but why would he do that this late, and anyway, there’s no one in the room. We walk in and out the doors, nod to each other as we thread past each other in the tight stairwells, quietly waiting for what happens next. 

Erika tells the other two grad students who share the room on the top floor with her about the funny thing she’s found in her room. If you stand in one corner, facing the walls, it feels like someone’s breathing on you, even though you’re nowhere near the windows. Neither of them believe her until they try it themselves and there it is, warm and regular, in and out, in and out. Some of us are starting to get nervous. The repairman comes to Ms. Perez’s unit and spends an hour putting his ear to the wall, straining to hear something, but there’s nothing to hear. Only he does find a little puddle of water behind a bookshelf, and when on some instinct, he dips his finger in, it tastes salty. The two children say they heard the steps again, so Mrs. Berry gives the same voiceless laugh she did the first time, but also shares a worried glance with her husband. 

We all know things left untended get worse, but living in such a vast world forces us to forget. Isaac wakes up to the grip on his foot again, only this time, it doesn’t let go. The grip is no tighter than a handshake, but even when he stands up, he can still feel it, and he’s alone. He’s all alone. He walks back and forth through the room, faster and faster, like he’s trying to run away from his own foot. Then, it lets go. Ms. Perez checks the puddle that the repairman said he couldn’t do anything about, and sure enough, it’s larger. Erika finds she doesn’t need to stand in the corner to feel the breathing anymore. Half the room is full of it now.

When Mr. Berry hears the steps for the first time, his jaw tightens. He should be alone in his apartment, with the kids at school and his wife at work, but he isn’t. None of us are. Ms. Perez finds that sometimes, when the dripping starts, she cries too. Erika’s spending more and more of her time outside her room, on the sofa. Sometimes she glances at her door with a hunted expression, like she thinks she’s hearing something. In and out, in and out. Across the hall, you can hear a heart beating when you press your ear against the wall. The hand grabs Isaac’s wrist hard enough to leave bruises. The garden out front has hair growing among the grass. Thick, brown hair, just like in all the newspaper pictures. We all know something bad is happening, and we all know we ought to be able to stop it. 

Isaac reads somewhere online that if you light a stick of incense, it will purify a room. Ms. Perez turns to the half-remembered prayers she was taught as a little girl. Mr. Berry sits up at night, waiting, not sure what he’s going to do when the footsteps start. The children are frightened when they walk past him to bed. Someone sprinkles salt all over their floor and it gets out  and crunches underfoot when we walk past. Erika sleeps on the couch for the first time and hopes it will just go away. We’re all scared. 

Meanwhile, the room on the second floor, the room where it all happened, sits quiet and empty. If you didn’t know the story, you could walk right by and never know anything was different about it, and we all try to. Still, we all heard the gunshot, then the sirens. We heard him yelling while the police officers dragged him out in handcuffs, and we saw her picture in the newspaper the next morning. The one where she’s looking up at something and trying so hard to smile. Another tragedy, another untended thing. 

“Whoever moves into that apartment will be haunted,” we joke, as if a wall could stop a ghost, as if the dead are firm and heavy, as if they don’t drift with the wind, growing like storm clouds, sprawling into mournful fogheads across the horizon. As if we aren’t all haunted already. As if there is no we to haunt. 

Mr. Berry and Erika stare into the darkness with the same trembling underneath different expressions. Isaac and Ms. Perez are both listening to something that doesn’t answer. A hand. Tears. Breath. Feet. It’s too big for any of them. The woman from the newspaper billows away, unfolding over the street, the town, the country.

---

LILLIE E. FRANKS — Lillie is a trans author and teacher who lives in Chicago, Illinois with the best cats. You can read her work at places like Always Crashing, Alice and Atlas, and McSweeneys or follow her on Twitter at @onyxaminedlife. She loves anything that is not the way it should be.

Art by IRINA TALL (NOVIKOVA) — Irina is an artist, graphic artist, and illustrator. She graduated from the State Academy of Slavic Cultures with a degree in art, and also has a bachelor’s degree in design. Her first personal exhibition “My soul is like a wild hawk” (2002) was held in the museum of Maxim Bagdanovich. In her works, she raises themes of ecology, draws on anti-war topics, and in 2005 she devoted a series of works to the Chernobyl disaster.