empty apartment

When she'd left he'd taken the time to mail everything in their apartment to her new address a thousand miles away. First, to be certain there wasn't anything left to connect them on his side, but also to be sure she'd have to remember.

The shipping cost him almost five grand. For the couch and bed he'd rented a UHaul and driven out on the Belt Parkway (almost out to the airport), dragging them carefully into the marsh reeds in the dead of night, like dumping bodies.

He'd kept just a photo album from a trip they'd taken to Germany, in the fall about a year before things had gone south for good. A lot of spicy sausage and too much beer, you couldn't get a beat on any of the people, and as for the travelers, they'd annoyed each other constantly.

They'd soldiered on, explored Hamburg Köln Heidelberg Berlin etc., each day grayer than the one before it. Photographing each other on every street, like people planting a whole batch of flags all over the moon, in case one blew away or got hit by an asteroid.

He regarded the pictures now as hostages, to be befriended briefly during the long stretches of captivity (in which depraved captor and wary captive fleetingly share the affinity of their isolation), but ultimately, to be torn to shreds and burned one by one, extinguishing the fire in long sprays of whiskey piss, flushing the whole mess and hoping he was drunk enough to sleep.

The first woman he'd brought home a few months later had confronted an almost completely empty apartment. Sleeping bags on the floor, an empty photo album, the bathroom littered in ashes. A fridge with just an unopened bottle of ketchup in it.

Single guy in New York, I've seen worse, she figured, and nestled closer to him on the floor, wondering what it would take to fix this one, the passing cars throwing slow searchlights along the walls.