This post is part of Fiction Friday, a series born out of my ongoing desire to be a novelist. These stories are meant to be read independently. They are fictional vignettes inspired by glimmers from my life.
For years afterward, this is what settled permanently into her memory: checks for the first and last months, the short dirty carpets, two sets of keys, one left in a cup on top of the fridge, the love seat she called about in the classifieds, the weekend she reupholstered it, the reverberating parties upstairs, the couple fighting downstairs, the sink that always clogged, the warm sweet scent of the nearby bakery in the mornings, buses thundering angrily down the street, people that yelled after them to wait, neighbors that flirted and laughed in the hallways, the purring of helicopters combing the city, the boyfriend who always called before coming over, him kissing her under her doorway on New Year's Eve, the month she had to call her father for money, the coin-operated washing machines left tacky from spilled detergent, the way the living room smelled like whatever she cooked in the kitchen, the fruit bowl piled high from the springtime trips to the farmer's market, the heat that suffocated the apartment in the worst of summer, the fraction of light that seeped through the blinds in autumn, and the stack of broken-down cardboard boxes she unearthed when the lease was nearly up, all her things barely fitting into them, crumpled bits of newspaper filling the leftover spaces.
