Turn Right on Old Sycamore Street

His new apartment was a street level. Perfect for your poetry, the landlady had said. All the sounds at night. Very poetic. At his look, she explained: Your poetry. One was in the paper; I loved it. He didn’t mention that it was a fluke, one among thousands, in a paper he thought no one read. He smiled, nodded, and paid his half of the deposit.

His roommate had already moved in. He had met the other man once, to confirm that he wasn’t a serial killer when he answered on Craigslist, though he wasn’t sure what his plan would have been if the other man was. They met at the internet café that he frequented, and he could barely hear his soon-to-be roommate above the noise the few times the man spoke. He learned that the other man didn’t do drugs or drink, said it interfered with his health. He also learned that the other man was a hard person to find a roommate for; that’s why he was so desperate to post an ad on Craigslist.

He, Greg, an ex-stoner in a new city with a devastated orphan’s lot, thought it was logical. He made arrangements to meet the man at the apartment the next day—the park bench was cold. He would have been at the apartment earlier, but the man had insisted that Greg not move in until six because his ex-girlfriend was visiting and he was going to try to get her back. Greg met the landlady that morning to pay and walked the streets until he could move in. By six, dusk was exploding over the horizon. Orange strips of cotton looked glued to a pink-streaked navy background, like a painting that hadn’t quite dried before the artist added the next layer. He left the park and began to walk down the little road, almost an alley, to the apartment. The sky was concealed by a thick layer of smog and the high rooftops on either side, and darkness fell faster than elsewhere. He shivered and walked a little faster. To his right, down a side alley, metal hit against something else. A garbage can bumping another? It made sense.

He reached the apartment and opened the door with the chipped key the landlady had given him. It was dark in the apartment, and quiet. Greg walked to his room and set his bag down. He would need sheets. Back in the kitchen, there was no food, but that didn’t bother him as it once had. Although only six, the dark sky and eerie quiet were sufficient conditions for sleep, so he went back to his room to do just that.

His roommate banged through the door an hour later, but didn’t turn on the lights. Greg heard him sit down and a weak laptop light illuminated the room outside Greg’s bedroom. He guessed the lights weren’t on to save costs on the electricity bill—neither of them were exactly loaded. It was cold; the heating was broken, the landlady had told him. Five hundred dollars he didn’t have would fix it. The machine thumped along in the window poorly, like a baby’s rattle.

In the room next to him, he could hear his roommate drumming his fingers on the table. Four heavy taps in rapid succession. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. Down the street, bass throbbed from a house party. A pulsating thrum filled Greg’s ears like pressure at high altitudes. He listened a while and it had begun to lull him into something like sleep when two distinctly different pops pierced through the steady rhythm. Two echoing explosions. Handgun.

His roommate stopped drumming his fingers. Greg stopped breathing for a few seconds. Minutes later, the high shrieks of police cars spun down the road. The lights stopped in front of their building, throwing a pattern over the glass. Red-white-blue, red-white-blue, red-white-blue. His roommate scraped his chair back and walked through the room to Greg’s. Greg could hear the irregular footsteps tap an unsure beat as other man bumped against the table and bed. His roommate stood by the window and looked out. More cars. Expensive tires skipped like stones over potholes. Ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. Beats. Rhythms. Good for your poetry, the landlady had said.

Poeticism, so rarely lost on Greg, disappeared in his eyes. This was not poetic; it was now’s situation. Maybe someday he would find it, or someone would find it for him, but now through the window he watched another man’s head bump the roof of one of the cars as the officers shoved him into it.