truly can’t believe that there are people out there who go through life not having a cat at home. how do you survive coming home and not having a silly little Beast come up to you??
i avoid printers at all costs but deep down i think i should’ve been a printer. life so easy. i sit there all squarelike and when someone has a minor task for me i goFUCK YOU
Text: Sometimes in the dead of night on the way to the kitchen for a glass of water, I see an extra door in the hallway, black and imposing.
It’s not a bad boarding house, as these things
go.
We’re not allowed up to the fourth floor, for
any reason – but I don’t blame the landlady for wanting her privacy.
Nobody but the landlady answers the strange
willow-patterned telephone on the third floor landing.
We all lock our windows on full moon nights.
No couples are allowed, ever. Only single women
and girls.
And sometimes, if you go down the hall to the
kitchen late at night, there’s a strange black door that’s never there by
daylight.
For some reason, it’s hard to get new lodgers
to stay. I don’t know why. It’s a little strange, maybe, but the meals are good,
Mrs Hallow the landlady is kind, and the rent is ridiculously cheap. I’ll take
the strange black door and the phone that rings even when there’s no wire going
to it over rats in the walls and cigarette ash in the food any day. My last
boarding house was like that. I like it here.
I’d been living here for nearly two years when
I lost my job working at the telephone exchange. It wasn’t my fault – they cut
the night shift back, and one of the girls cut was me. Mrs Hallow told me not
to worry – as I was an old lodger, she’d let me work for room and board while I
looked for another job. She’s so nice, I don’t know why people say she’s
creepy. It’s not her fault she’s so tall and thin, and her bones show through
her fragile old skin.
I worked hard, wanting her to be glad she’d
kept me. One of the jobs she gave me, since I was used to working nights, was
packing lunches after supper. For the Night Gentlemen, she told me, but didn’t
say more. Every night, I packed twenty lunches in twenty tin pails and filled twenty
thermoses with strong coffee. I made sandwiches, and boiled eggs, sliced
pickles and cheese, and packed a paper napkin into each pail. I was to have
everything done by eleven, Mrs Hallow told me, for the Night Gentlemen came at
midnight to collect their meals, and I should be in bed by then. By morning,
the pails were all gone. By evening, they were all stacked neatly in the
kitchen again, clean and ready to be filled. I never saw them come, but I
supposed it must be while I was sleeping.
Then I started to worry that my lunches were
dull. I baked cookies for the lunch pails, and pies and pasties. I put in
different kinds of fruit and vegetables each day. The Night Gentlemen worked
late hours, if they came for their lunches in the middle of the night. They
needed to eat good food. I looked through Mrs Hallow’s old recipe books and tried
new dishes, like german apple pancake and potato dumplings. Mrs Hallow was
pleased, and said she would pay me a little wage in addition to my room and
board, if I didn’t mind continuing. She was getting too old, she said, to make
all those meals every night.
I had been working at the boarding house for
nearly six months when I really messed up. I’d burned a whole batch of cookies
to a crisp, so I had to start all over, and I didn’t have time to decorate them
before evening. It was Valentine’s Day, and I felt so bad that I decided to
stay up late to finish them. The Night Gentlemen didn’t come until midnight, so
I had time… I thought.
The group chat has decided that since I’ve only had one sexual relationship and it wasn’t a very good one and I’ve since transitioned, changed my legal name, undergone hormone therapy and now had bottom surgery, that I have ship of theseus'ed my way back to being a virgin
