Tenant

It was five past three and he was late. Then there was a knock at the door, and so he wasn’t really that late after all. She went to answer the door and as soon as she opened it, hardly before she’d even been able to acknowledge the man standing outside with a bag in his left hand, he pushed past her and into the house, down the hallway and into the bedroom opposite the kitchen at the far end.

“Hello,” she said to herself as she closed the door behind him before walking after him towards his bedroom. The bedroom door swung closed before she got there, and she huffed and walked into the kitchen instead and picked up the phone from the counter top. She called her boyfriend.

“Hi,” she said.

“Is he there?”

“Yeah, he’s weird.”

“Be quiet, he’s fine.”

“No he’s not. Are you going to be home soon?”

“I’m here ‘til five.”

“Can’t you leave early?”

“Sorry.”

“Try.”

“Okay.”

“Love you.”

“You too. Bye.”

“Bye.”

She walked back to the bedroom door and tapped on it twice with her fingernails. It opened a crack and the man looked out at her.

“Are you okay?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he said, and he closed the door. She raised her hand to tap on the door again but stopped short of making contact and instead went into the living room and sat on the sofa to watch television. She watched with the sound turned down because with the living room door opening to the back of the sofa she was worried that the intruder might stalk up behind her silently and kill her. He probably wouldn’t kill her, but how was she to know that? And if he was that silent, it probably wouldn’t matter how loud the television was. Still, it was a small thing that made her feel slightly safer in her own home.

It also allowed her to listen for any noises coming from the room that she feared she’d lost forever. There wasn’t any noise at all for quite some time, and then there was a kind of rhythmic knocking, it sounded like someone trying to make the sound of a horse with two halves of a coconut. She stood up and turned to the doorway to look out in to the hallway as if doing so might reveal what was making this noise.

She swung around the sofa and walked out into the hallway, creeping to the man’s door so as not to alert him to her presence, and put her ear as close to it as she dared without actually touching it. Still she heard the noise.

She pictured a horse on a treadmill, but he couldn’t possibly have carried that in in his holdall. She pictured all sorts more but still couldn’t make any sense of what might be making the noise.

Then, as sudden as it had started, it stopped and the door swung open and she was face to face with him, or he was face to her ear, and she didn’t know whether to run away. She was almost certain that he’d seen her.

“Hi,” she tried, smiling.

He closed the door.