Design for Living

At some point it became obvious that my boyfriend Pascal and I should move in together. We were almost thirty, we were pleased with his direction and his salary, and I worked hard, too. He’d been renting a dark, interior-facing room from loosely employed people with rampant house plants. I lived in baby stroller Brooklyn, where I also had a roommate, a banged girl named Luma. Luma had an on-off boyfriend, George, a rather on-off person himself. Pascal and I often heard them through the walls: their low and sleepy pleasure or hissing fights with slammed doors that made Pascal and me meet eyes gratefully—we never let things get out of hand like that.

But roommate Luma and boyfriend George had been off for a while now. And Pascal’s lease was up soon. It was March. Spring, my most forgotten season, was leaking all around us. Pascal and I always talked about how my apartment would be perfect for a couple: Luma’s bedroom could easily be converted into an office and her large windows faced the street, perfect for Pascal to set up his desk and look out and be inspired.

“Just such a great apartment for a couple,” Pascal said wistfully. We were standing in her room, watching a bewildered delivery man rove in the street.

“You really don’t think she’ll move out?” he asked.

“She said you were spending too much time here the other day,” I said.

“Luma needs a boyfriend,” Pascal said. “What’s she gonna do? Mope around all day? Bake soufflés? We’re trying to start a life here, Gab!” He moved into that high, frantic voice of his.

“Maybe she’ll get back with George,” I said.


Luma made eggs for us the next morning: she always put the cracked shells back in the carton and the carton back in the refrigerator. And so sometimes the carton was filled all with egg shells and maybe one or two eggs and these sat in our refrigerator, like dreams. She took a spatula and poked each yolk in the pan and then stirred the mess together, marbling white with yellow.

“Hard scramble okay?” Luma shoveled the eggs onto three little plates and deftly cracked pepper on.

“What’s George been up to these days,” Pascal said, “I miss that guy.”

“Dunno. We’re over.” She paused. “Why? Have you heard anything?”

“No.”

Pascal used the side of his fork to scrape up his eggs. “Well, what about that guy Jake. Jake Cherry? I was out with him recently and he was sobbing in a stairwell about you. Didn’t he send you flowers on your birthday?”

“The lilies could have killed Choux,” Luma said, glancing at the cream-colored cat perched on the arm of the sofa.

“Have you ever been to Jake’s place? He’s got an awesome apartment. Decorated, not like one of those guys that doesn’t even have a toilet paper holder.” Pascal leaned back in his chair. “I’m always jealous of what he orders at restaurants,” he added.

“Mm,” Luma said, squirting some ketchup on her eggs, “but Jake’s sober. And bald.”

“Bald is good ! Bald men have very high testosterone.”

“Sober’s good too,” I said. “I heard George is thirty days sober now, actually. And he has great hair.”

“I did always like George, you know,” Pascal said.

“Me too,” I said, “George was nice.”

“But not normal. Not boring,” Pascal replied, “A very unique person.”

“He had his own ways, for sure. His own little George things. But he’s sober now.”

“And I hear he’s making good money now,” Pascal said. “I always knew he could. You can tell.”

We were quiet, George all in our minds.

“I want a love that is undeniably ruthless,” Luma said, gazing off, zoning out, or in to, a memory.

“Come here, Choux,” she called, pushing the memory and plate of eggs away and patting her lap. The cat popped up and immediately began to purr and shed on Luma’s black pajama set. 

“Well, George did send me a letter the other day,” she said.

We read George’s love letter together. Pascal praised the letter for being personal and specific. He pointed out that if anyone else had read this letter, they would know that it was to Luma, from George, and that it was undeniably a love letter. Luma read it over a few more times, and agreed with him, huffing into her bangs. She was so absorbed she even let Pascal smoke in the kitchen. I pulled out my graphoanalysis book and we examined George’s handwriting. He tended toward suavity, a genial disposition, speed and vitality. And to make matters better,  I was right, George had recently made an almost avant garde amount of money online trading.

Luma took a peach to her room and got ready to go to work. As did we, slowly pulling on our clothes and in my case, trying them on and then ripping them off, tossing them to the ground and over the backs of chairs and onto the bed and under the bed, deciding what to wear while Pascal looked increasingly anxious and aroused.


We got a room for the night to give them some privacy. Pascal liked cheap, dingy motels. It made him feel deranged and taboo, and he hated to spend money when it was just a room and a bed.

The man working the desk had a squashed black thumbnail and a pleasant, if drawn face behind the bulletproof glass. Our room was on the first floor and smelled of tobacco and bleach. The bed squeaked as soon as Pascal flopped down on it. Immediately he rose again. “I’m going to check out the vending machine,” he said.

Soon we were on the topic of ice machines, their importance, their prevalence, in hotels and motels all across the world. Why did people need ice so badly. Pascal chalked it up to the American obsession with ice cold beverages, and produced a bottle of whiskey and made use of the ice machine. Soon we were laughing and burping. Pascal was in better spirits than usual, opened and throated by the alcohol and cable programming. He crossed his ankles, sunk his chin into his chest and his mind into competitive figure skating, clips of Family Guy, slow motion high definition footage of bull elephant seals slamming their four ton bodies into each other.

“It reeks of cigs in here,” I said.

“Do you think that means I can smoke?”

“Absolutely not,” I said.

“You know about my boss’s cigarette thing, right. He admitted to me once how he loved to see the sight of a young woman smoking. ‘But they just don’t do it like they used to.’ And before a company baseball game once, I was out smoking a cigarette and Michael, one of the senior designers, gave me a hard time for it. But my boss said, ‘Hey, Mike, let Pascal smoke! Let him smoke.' And then we lost, of course.”

Pascal hated losing. Sometimes he went to great lengths to win something he didn’t even care about. We could not gamble, we could not play games with children. In Turkey, I tried to rip him  away from some kids playing soccer in a patch of dust. A fat, dirty boy with cankles kept scoring on him. At one point Pascal ran over for a sweaty kiss and whispered: “Is he stealing my soul?”

“What?”

“Him,” he pointed to the tubby one in flip-flops, “is he taking my personality?”

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Seriously, baby, is he? I have to beat him.” He plunged back into the game.

“More whiskey?” Pascal pressed the bottle in my face and I handed over my glass. He filled it almost to the top.

“Drink!” he said. I drank, hoping it would soften the itchy sheets, the street lamps blazing through the blinds.

We lost almost an hour of our lives to a reality show about TSA agents.

“More?” he poured.

“What do you think they’re doing right now?” I sipped.

“Probably dreaming about smuggled liquids. Lithium batteries. Undeclared meats and veg.”

“I meant Luma and George.”

“Oh. Fucking, hopefully. George is smart, I’m sure he brought flowers or wine or something.”

“You think she’ll take him back?” I asked.

“If he brings flowers,” Pascal said.

“Flowers didn’t work for Jake.”

“Reconciliation is one of the best feelings in the world, Gab,” said Pascal. “Don’t underestimate that.”

“You never get me flowers.” I picked at the linty comforter.

“We’ve never had to reconcile,” Pascal said. But a part of me thought, a relationship is always a reconciliation.

“Maybe we should give it a try,” I said. On TV, a dressage horse danced brokenly.

“Okay,” he said, a flash in his eyes. “Let’s both say the worst thing we could about each other. So it’s out there, on the table and then we can make up.”

“You go first.” I took a long swallow of whiskey.

“No, you.”
“Okay. Um….hmmm….”

“Come on.”

“Uh–sometimes I worry you stay with me just because you don’t want to lose. Or get cursed.” He laughed and scratched his arm.

“Your turn,” I said.

“Your chronic indecision and waffling makes it difficult to envision a future between us,” he said quickly.

A giant black horse cantered across the screen.

“There. Reconciled?” Pascal kissed me on the lower quadrant of my mouth and went out to the parking lot to smoke and call his mother. I washed my face, taking extra time to lather, rinse, pat dry, and moisturize.


Falling asleep, I walked through the apartment, imagining how it would look and feel once it contained all of the things of Pascal. His graphite sketches, his dust-jacketed books and neatly folded shirts…there might even be a dog in the mix if we could agree on a breed. We would take it for long luxurious walks and talk about our days, how lovely it was to come back home and prepare a pasta meal and watch our favorite show.

Outside the motel, I heard a woman scream in a far-off way, as if out the window of a moving car. The man at the front would deal with it. He had cameras, he was watching everything. Pascal, having not quite managed to make love, blew a word or two of consolation from the depths of his sleep.


“It’s just until I figure something out,” said George. “I’ll help with rent, of course.”

“What happened to your internet money,” I said.

“It’s gone. This stuff is practically gambling, you know. I’ll make it all back though. Eventually. But we’re headed for a nuclear winter, you could say, in this business.”

George spoke out of his signature side of the mouth and had his legs spread outrageously open, leaning back in my leather Greek-key embossed dining chairs so that the front legs lifted off the ground. He’d gotten a haircut and his hair, usually golden at the tips, looked slightly darker. But he was still an adult blonde man, and a very short one at that.

Luma plopped onto his lap, Choux in her arms. The couple’s faces glowed with the fresh blood of love. Pascal was on the couch, looking pale and queasy from the night before.

“I’m gonna try to get him a job at the bakery,” said Luma.

“Where were you living before?” I asked George.

“Hotels. Five star ones. Room service in silver thingies, bell boys…”

“So that’s fine if he stays here for a while?” Luma said, looking at both of us. “I mean, Pascal’s here all the time. So it shouldn’t be a problem, right?”

Pascal nodded though it was not his nod to give.

George appraised the living room. Our furniture was frosted orange with the sunset. Choux jumped out of Luma’s arms and careened into her hidden planter litter box.

“I missed this place,” he said.

George left and returned a couple hours later with four overstuffed softcover suitcases still bearing their luggage tags and stickers. He ripped these off and left them on the kitchen table for Choux to paw at and chase.

The house was quiet. At each end, the couples were quiet. We were fully absorbed in our respective partners. Sometimes, one of us rose to use the toilet or grab a snack from the kitchen. The boys grunted at each other as they passed, Luma and I were cool and chatty. I assured Pascal that this wouldn’t be a forever thing. “We could always go to mine,” Pascal suggested, smiling crookedly. But I didn’t want to give up. George was an extremely invasive and persistent person: he often pushed people toward making extravagant purchases and decisions. I quit my last job because he’d taken too many stimulants that day and wanted to make someone do something. Everywhere he went, his whole self exploded open. There were times when, walking into a bar or a store, you could tell he had just been there. Dazed looking employees, George shrapnel everywhere. So Pascal and I plotted our future in hushed tones, like water had been poured over our voices and frozen them into a crouching position.



We noticed all of the cups and dishware was disappearing. And toilet paper, we were going through toilet paper at an incredible rate. Some nights, if we got home from work early enough, we managed to gain control of the TV or kitchen. There were times we walked in to find them starting a four-hour slow-braised pulled pork taco bowls with homemade guacamole, fresh salsa, and George even had the cheese cloth out and was squeezing mounds of queso fresco from a dairy teat. Plus they had bad knife skills, chopped onions for hours… We’d race back to the apartment just to find they’d already staked out the living room and we were forced to slink to my room and watch whatever on Pascal’s laptop while he stepped out every half hour to smoke.

On rare days that both boys were out of the house, Luma and I locked ourselves in our rooms and experienced the passage of time in our own particular ways. In the light of the afternoon sun streaming through my window, with the faint sounds of the Celestial parish singers across the street, other people felt far away and harmless. I heard Luma on the phone with her mother, describing how happy she and George were now, how the space between them had been sealed up. I imagined the two of them fused together, or rather, sewn back together after a prolonged absence. But to seal something together requires some kind of glue, a bonding agent. Pascal and I were close, so close that sometimes we could not see the other person, they’d blown into an abstract and blurry entity, and we looked right past one another at some crisp clear thing beyond.

Sometimes I worried about the handsome freckled man who struck up a conversation with me at the gym. With a few deft motions, he immediately uncovered topics of personal finance, careers, dreams, and problems of love. I excused myself to the locker room feeling flayed. A few days later a mutual friend texted me.

“I heard you met my hot ginger friend at Equinox,” she said.

“Oh? What did he say?”

The freckled man predicted he and I would get married.



We had a dinner where we were so in love. White table cloths and very small tables. Pascal, who rarely ate meat, indulged in a lamb burger with white anchovies.

“Reminds me of de Sade,” he said, staring at his plate.

His lease had officially ended. “It’s only fair that you move in,” I said, “just until you figure things out,” I parroted Luma’s vocal fry. The rest of the evening, we spoke about our most favorite topic: the night we met and all of the tiny moments and decisions that led up to that chance encounter. And then while I was in the restroom, Pascal paid for dinner. We kissed on our way out, trilling thank you’s to the restaurant host as she wiped down menus.

The meat made Pascal boyish and loose and we walked home with a hand in the back of the other’s jean pocket, feeling the stride and muscle underneath the denim. I ran ahead of him and hid behind a tree. He kicked an egg carton and yelped: it was a cinderblock. The streetlamp made us feel quaint and chosen. We knew tomorrow would be a warm day, another hot, sticky one where we could barely go outside or move. Summer was becoming more and more like that. We matched strides again and arrived at the apartment. He waited impatiently while I fumbled with the house keys.

“Just let me do it,” he said, taking the keys and forcing the door open. We fell into the building, stopping briefly to glance over the mail and packages, nothing for us, something for George but neither of us bothered to bring it inside.

Pascal opened the front door. Luma was on top of George, on the couch. Somehow they didn’t notice us, and Luma continued to sluck back and forth on George’s groin, who was deeply involved in clutching the bowl of her hips against his. His fingertips gripped the molded indents of the small of Luma’s back, her breasts bounced as if on marionette strings and her bangs were dark against her flushed forehead.
Pascal slammed the door closed again. We stood in the foyer, smelling my elderly Chinese neighbor’s cooking and looking at her striped full-bottom underwear drying on the railing.

“Damn,” Pascal said. “That was crazy.”

He laughed very hard and then became quiet, as if laughter suddenly pained him. When we finally went inside they were gone but for a warm wet patch on the couch.


Around this time, Pascal developed the habit of leaving the front door open. He would rush off to work in the morning and Luma or George or I would come out of our room and see that the front door was wide open. “Sorry! I’m sorry!” he apologized, but it happened three or four more times, to the point that Luma screamed at him, “Choux will get out, you know!”

“The fugitive,” he murmured.

“She’s right,” I told him. “What if you were the last one home and you left it open for hours? And robbers entered our apartment and stole everything? If a serial killer got in here and murdered me while I was in the shower?” Pascal made a small, sad clucking noise. He started leaving notes to himself around the house: Close the door! Check the door! Close the fucking door! His phone background: DOOR. He stuck a Post-It in the foyer, he set a reminder to double-check at 9:02am, two minutes after he had to leave for work. He handled all doors more carefully, I noticed. He handled everything with more care, in fact. Pascal had become triply fastidious. All of his belongings were relegated to the armchair in my room, a neat little pile of clothing not a foot high and the rest were vacuum-sealed in boxes in the closet. He kept his toothbrush on his person, he washed and hand-dried every fork and cup as soon as he was done with it. He even scooped Choux's litter and replenished her water. (All this was somehow easier to him than closing the door.)

So it was amazing, how every day we would come home and there would be some new victory they had mounted against us. Luma unfurled on her yoga mat and stretched in the living room, simultaneously watching a reality show on the flatscreen, a workout video on her laptop, and scrolling on her phone. She could barely move, so cluttered was our living space now with George’s suitcases, Pascal’s books, my shopping returns and her industrial-grade baking appliances and buckets of flour and sugar. In some of those huge cambro tubs, sourdough poolish lay, living, breathing. Luma kicking her foot in the air and making circles with her big toe, chattering to George about her favorite supermarkets, how many children she wanted to have, and with how many years between them…meanwhile the sink was crammed with crusted dishes, dust bunnies whirled in every corner, and the bathtub drain was clogged with everyone’s hair. Pascal insisted on keeping our own personal supply of toilet paper in my room, bringing it to and from the bathroom with every trip.

“How do they go through that much toilet paper?” He was genuinely bewildered, two rolls of Charmin in his lap. “And how do they use so many dishes? Isn’t that the whole point of ordering take-out? No clean-up?”

“Maybe they just have a different threshold than us,” I said.

“Threshold of what?”

“Living, I guess.”

They had dominion over every room. Little soldiers stationed on the TV stand, the arm of the couch, top of the fridge, so that everywhere I stepped, I felt as if I was invading. Our troops were not so strong. When we tried to have sex, Pascal could not perform for fear of making a noise. But that wouldn’t have bothered Luma and George anyway. They hardly slept, they were so in love. They discharged secrets, wishes, giggles into each other but also throughout the whole house, their voices amplified by happiness. It was as if they no longer needed sleep or food or money.

“I’m meeting a broker at eight then going straight to work,” Pascal said in bed one night, flipping the pillow.

“You’re looking at apartments again?”

“Why are you whispering,” said Pascal, “it’s not like you’re going to bug them. Maybe we should start banging pots and pans. ”

“I thought we were gonna stick it out here until they leave. That was the plan.”

“Are they leaving?”

Luma’s laugh rang through the wall.

“I need my own space,” he said. “I don’t know if I can wait much longer.”

I texted Luma: Please, can you guys keep it down a bit?

“Maybe I should just go to my shitty little hotel,” he said.

He tossed and turned all night and oh I could feel his violence and his anger in the bed, in every sigh, in every twitch and flip.


On the way home from work, I picked up a package of firm tofu, tamari, some green onions and Nishiki rice. Pascal was waiting on the stoop, his work bag beside him. He finished a cigarette, ran his hands through his hair and led us inside without a word, jangling the keys and jimmying them loudly in the lock in case anything below the belt was happening inside the apartment. George and Luma were in the kitchen in matching gingham aprons. Choux sat on the counter and sniffed at Luma’s breast. Steam rose from a large pot. George at the sink, pounding something.

“What’re you guys doing?” I said.

Luma grabbed metal prongs and removed a giant scarlet crab from the pot.

“Pork forcemeat quenelles in lamb jus, on sourdough with a duck terrine,” George called over his shoulder. “Luma’s doing her crab salad. And a lemon butter cake, too, of course.”

“We were gonna cook dinner.” I held up my small bag of groceries.

“Oh, this will take no time at all,” said George.

“By the way—,” Luma said, dunking a crab into a bowl of ice water, sloshing some down the front of her thighs.

“Is it still alive?” Pascal asked in a shrill voice. In the heat of the apartment—the steam and the oven and the broken overhead fan—sweat broke on his upper lip and at the base of his hairline.

“By the way Pascal, you left the door open again this morning. And Choux got out and she was halfway down the street. If the neighbor hadn’t found her—”

“That’s not possible,” he said, “I made sure to close it behind me.”

Luma removed one of the chilled crabs from the water and with a pair of nimble silver jaws, started to crack the crab’s forearms, sending splinters and shards of dappled red shell across the room, on the carpet, into the bookshelf, into a dead potted plant.

“Well, who else leaves the door open?” she said, extracting a sliver of milky flesh. “It’s getting ridiculous. How many times do you have to be told something like that? No one else has this problem. I’m sure you wouldn’t leave your own house wide open, would you, Pascal?”

“I didn’t–”

“I think we have to take his keys. I just don’t feel safe. Someone will always be home to let you in, anyway,” she blew her hair out of her face. “God it’s hot in here, huh?”

“I didn’t leave it open,” Pascal said.

George stomped across the kitchen menacingly, holding a compact gob of dripping pink meat in his hands.

“Hey,” Pascal said. George dropped the meat into a metal bowl with a splash. “Are you hearing me? I really didn’t this time. I double checked before I left. I may have even taken a picture…” He fished around in his pocket.

“Babe, you were the last one to leave the house,” I said in a low small voice. George coughed and re-tied his apron. A gas burner click, click, clicked. Pascal looked at me with unprecedented fatigue.



Pascal went to stay at his parents’ upstate for a while. I made an effort to spend time in the living room. Some pigeons flocked to the window sill down from the building shaft. Some of the photos on our refrigerator—trips we’d taken over the years, smiling, sun-guzzled selfies—were curling with age. George perused Pascal’s design books, flipping the pages so aggressively they almost ripped with each lick and turn. We spent an afternoon drinking the rest of Pascal’s whiskey.

“You should invite a friend over, Gab,” said George. “You never see anyone.” He looked up from his book, licked a finger and smoothed his pale eyebrows over.

“Really?”

“Why not? I mean, look at the way he treated you, right. You should relax a little bit.”

“Like who.” I thought of the freckled man. His freckled lips.

“Someone fun. You should invest in people who will never change or give up on you,” George said.

I invited Benny from college over. When Luma came home and saw Benny struggling to uncork a wine bottle, she mouthed, Who is he. George beat a piece of gum in the hinge of his jaw and winked.

Benny insisted on cooking and purchased two fat rib eye steaks for us. He wanted me to watch him baste the meat. The spoon was too short, the flame too high, the foaming brown butter went soaring and splattering over the meat. Every few seconds he shrieked and dropped the spoon. By the end he’d used up every paper towel in the kitchen to sop up grease and wipe his hands.

I offered Luma and George some steak but they declined, emerging forty minutes later to greet a delivery guy and skulk back to their room with a sticker-sealed Chipotle bag.

We ate. Then all of the fat of Benny’s steak was laid to the side of the plate. The candles were nearly down to the nub. Benny’s chill playlist was on. He finished his wine, maintaining eye contact through the final sip as his left eye warped and turned cyclopean through the glass. He went to pour himself another but only a few drops dribbled out.

“Don’t worry, I brought another bottle,” he said. “It’s in my bag. No more Franzia for us, huh.” His nipples were dark and hard underneath his white tee. Benny once said that the only thing he liked about sex was the idea that someone would let him do that to them. What did his apartment look like, I suddenly wondered.

“You like my apartment?” I said.

“Yup, awesome place,” he said, not looking around.

“It’s a nice apartment,” I said. “You have to hold onto a place like this.”

“Yup.” Benny touched his knee to mine then jumped out of his seat.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Baby cockroach!”

I killed it and we opened the second bottle.


Luma and George finally went off again. Most nights they screamed at each other until very early in the morning, just like they used to. Luma’s sobs were so powerful I thought she might vomit with emotion. It was delicious. It was amazing. I wished more than anything that Pascal was there to witness it. But when I went to bring Luma a glass of water, she didn’t seem so put out. Her bangs were stuck to her tear-spotty face, yeah, but George was always there, she was wrapped in his arms and they looked happier and closer than before, as if each argument were a mutual victory. In fact, they were more productive and inspired than ever. George filled the house with his pacing and his phone calls and Luma fell into a baking frenzy: she caught yeast from the air and made sweet sourdough breads brushed with egg yolk, braided and baked to a shiny brown. I ate the test loaves, George supplied us with Japanese beer, we talked about Pascal.

“We wanted to move in together,” I blubbered, “to really start our lives.”

“People who love each other break up all the time,” said George.

“He treats everything of yours as his own,” added Luma. “He acts like he knows people who have no idea who he is.”

“He’s stingy, he smokes black Spirits, doesn’t work out. Terrible for your sperm count, you know.”

“He peed in my room and denied it,” Luma said. She tore off a piece of dough and fed it to the cat.

“That can’t be true,” I said.

“In the middle of the night he came in and peed in the corner.”

“He really scared us,” George said. “One night we thought he was going to kill us.” He paused for a moment and used one hand to kind of swirl the air in front of his face. “He has a face that doesn’t take shadows very well.”

Nobody mentioned the door incident.

“Oops, hold on,” George held up his phone and wiggled it, “business call.”

“Forget about Pascal, ” Luma said, frowning, trying to shake some sticky dough off her palm. “It’s the three of us now. That’s not so bad, right? We’re all friends.”


I came home from work one day. I walked up the stairs and stopped at our door, which was wide open. I stepped inside. The apartment was eerie and clean. It felt like coming home from a vacation. The throw was folded and laid over the edge of the couch, the sink was empty of dirty dishes. I opened the fridge. Most of the food was gone. I grabbed a soggy baby carrot from a ripped-open bag, sat for a moment and chewed. Luma’s cat leapt onto the kitchen table and butted my shoulder softly with her head. Shafts of dusty light came through the kitchen window and struck the recently wiped down counter. I patted Choux and she responded to my touch gratefully, rippling under my fingers. I got up and she followed me, then raced ahead to Luma’s room, pressing close to the wall. Luma’s room was bare and dirty in the corners and somehow appeared much smaller. The animal jumped on the stained mattress and looked at me with baleful green eyes.

Luma and George came back one more time to move the rest of their stuff out. George hired movers, paid for everything. Apparently he’d made all his money back, basically overnight. Then Luma’s co-worker told her about a vacant apartment near the bakery: rent-stabilized, old-school doorman, elevator, dishwasher, in-unit laundry, ten-foot ceilings, crown molding, south-facing windows… They signed the lease immediately, paid six months up front. George showed me a breathy four-minute video tour of the place.

“Looks very nice,” I said, handing his phone back to him.

“And there’s an extra bedroom slash… baby room.”

“We’re about ready here,” the mover grunted. The movers wore wide girdles and knee pads and had long, Polish faces with noses that emerged from their foreheads. George shoved his phone in his front pocket. We stood outside and looked into the bowels of the truck. They had much more crap than I ever even knew about. Choux wailed from her carrier. Luma gave me a hug and George kissed me on the cheek, just brushing my ear with his lips.


“Baby they’re gone,” I said. “They moved out.”

Pascal laughed and sucked his cigarette. His mother spoke French softly in the background and he murmured something back to her.

“Are you gonna come back now?”

He paused for a moment. “Yeah.”

I didn’t know what to say. There was all of this stuff in the air.

“I can’t wait to see you,” I said.

“I have the house all planned out,” I said, staring at the shattered flatscreen. The movers knocked it on the way out, and George had taped an envelope containing an almost offensive sum of money to the screen.

“Me too,” Pascal said.

“You too what?”

“I can’t wait to see you, too.”

“We won,” I said. He hung up.

Downstairs, I heard the front door of the building clatter and then screaming—horrible, piercing shrieks. A troop of young women marched through the foyer and up the stairs.

“This couple has lived here for ages,” came a voice as the girls passed the apartment. “I’m gonna take it when they’re gone.”




Zans Brady Krohn is a writer from Palo Alto, California. She has published fiction in Muumuu House, Forever Magazine, Heavy Traffic, Civilization, Blue Arrangements, Expat, and The Drunken Canal. She was a recipient of the Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation for Literature and the Arts Fall 2023 residency, and guest edited Blue Arrangements that winter. She is the fiction editor of Byline and is currently working on her first novel.