The Upstairs Apartment

        It sits above the street like a listening post. The window is its single eye, watching life below, catching the drift of headlights at night and the shuffle of early morning footsteps. The wallpaper is patterned with flowers that never existed—petals too symmetrical, colors too polite. They feel like someone’s idea of nature rather than nature itself.

       The kitchen is barely a room at all—more of a pause before the dead-end. A miniature stove that clicks when it warms, a refrigerator that hums like it has always been tired, a sink that seems surprised each time water runs through it. The wooden table and its two chairs look like they were built for a smaller era, one where people didn’t lean back or spread out.

       The living room is arranged like a waiting area for a life that hasn’t quite arrived. One sofa against the wall, its cushions shaped by whoever sat there last. Across from it, the wingback chair stands like a witness. The coffee table between them holds a glass ashtray—clean, but with the faint ghost of past smoke—and a ceramic Elvis who looks to be permanently in mid‑performance.

       The bathroom door sticks. The bedroom is modest: one dresser, one nightstand, one lamp that casts a warm circle of light that never reaches the corners. It’s a room that will never see a claustrophobic.

And always, always, the sounds from below.

       JJ’s Market is not just downstairs—it’s underneath my life. Every conversation, every complaint, every whispered gossip floats upward like steam. I hear the bell on the door each time someone comes and goes, the ding of the register, the Yoohoo deliveries from Teddy, her favorite delivery man and the way JJ’s voice changes depending on who she’s talking to. Even her silences have a sound.

    My typewriter needed a rubber pad between it and the wooden table because she said my banging on the keys was too loud. She doesn’t realize her entire world rises through these floorboards. I hear her stories, her opinions, her transactions, her friendships, her frustrations. I can hear the market breathe.

    It’s a strange intimacy—two lives stacked vertically, each one echoing into the other. It is the sound of what I can afford.

    ZC